Today I will be talking about my experience with editing a Wikipedia page for the first time and how it changed my view of Wikipedia alongside everything else I learned throughout this process. The beginning of this process, thinking of a topic for which article I wanted to edit, may have been the most difficult part. I wanted to make sure that I chose a topic that I am knowledgeable about so that there would be a good chance that I would have positive information to include within the article. I did not want to choose a topic that is too popular as it would be much more difficult to find any edits to make or information to include that has not already been added. I ended up deciding to choose a soccer player’s Wikipedia page to edit, as I am a massive fan of soccer and follow many players very closely and know a lot of information about them. After looking through a couple player’s pages, I ended up choosing Nico O’Reilly, a 21 year old footballer that plays for Manchester City. I think that this was a good choice due to the fact that he is early on in his career and does not have the biggest of following, giving me a chance to add information to his article page before others did.
The next step in this process was to find an edit that I could make in the article. Something that stood out to me on the page was the “Style of play” section in the article.
This information about the player was not only out-dated as it was from 2023, but also left out crucial information about the player’s primary position and role as a left-back, or left defender. I decided that this section was where I would make my edit, including updated information about O’Reilly’s style of play. To do this, I first went to the “Talk” tab of the article to add a comment about the edit that I planned to make and why.
After adding my comment, I waited to see if any other users replied with their thoughts to my suggested edit. I did not think that anyone would respond, due to the article not being very popular. A while later, as expected, I did not receive any replies to my comment and decided to go ahead with the edit.
The final version of the additions that I made on the article appears as so below.
Overall, I think that this experience provided me with many new views regarding Wikipedia and has given me a better understanding of the editing process within the articles. The first thing that stood out to me was truly how easy it is to edit the information on a Wikipedia page, making me realize why Wikipedia is not allowed to be used as a source for many school assignments. With this, I also realized how difficult it can actually be to find a mistake or piece of incorrect information in these articles. As someone who was reading through many different articles trying to find mistakes or lacking information, many of the articles seemed to include almost all of the information on the topics without any major mistakes.
Link to edited article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_O%27Reilly