Whenever articles on Wikipedia's editing process come up, you often see comments about adversarial edit wars, and people giving up. So, I want to offer contrary anecdotes: my experiences editing Wikipedia have been good.
I've only ever written one article, which has gone unchallenged for over two years now, probably because the topic is abstruse and difficult for everyone to understand in the first place (which is why I wrote the article):
Ditto. I've made small edits to dozens of articles over the years, and it's been painless. My carefully-referenced edit about giant Scottish worms still stands:
This isn't as much about the 'experience' had on the site, as it is offered as evidence. Many people post links to their controversial pages, you can see the reversion history, not to mention some talk pages with arguments so bad as to make middle school look tame, so this isn't just 'wah some editor made my experience bad' rather, it's about the process itself and showing how flawed it is, and how it keeps actual information from making it to the pages, with sometimes bad information being pushed to the fore by some overzealous maintainer. Wikipedia is cited more often every day, and its pages are taken for law by some, as absolute fact, but as others in this thread have stated, this couldn't be further from the truth. When politics/money and personal motives get involved things get ugly. It's important people realize how upside down and downright toxic some wikipedia pages are. I've posted on this topic before, but it's kind of a hot topic for me. Probably because what could be such a great tool for us all has to be ruined by 'wikilawyers'. ie, this is why we can't have nice things.
I've only ever written one article, which has gone unchallenged for over two years now, probably because the topic is abstruse and difficult for everyone to understand in the first place (which is why I wrote the article):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medcouple
But I've also made minor edits here and there. For example, I removed some fluff around the D3.js article. Also unchallenged:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=D3.js&diff=803775...
So, if you hear stories about how awful editing Wikipedia is, remember that it can also be a pleasant experience.
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