User blog:SsVivid/You Can Edit, Too!

I've noticed a couple people taking part in a method of contributing to the wiki in a way that seems a little... less than efficient. Specifically, I see a lot of comments in the talk section of articles pointing out things that can be added or fixed. The problem with this is that it doesn't fix anything. I guess it's a byproduct of our community spending so much time on forums where only the original author can fix typos and other content. A lot of the time, if I see such a comment, I'll go ahead and fix whatever the problem is just because I don't know if it will ever get done otherwise.

Sometimes, though, the comments are about things that I have absolutely no background about and have never personally encountered. In those situations, it wouldn't really be appropriate for me to add the information. I try to avoid talking about things that I have no idea about.

What I'm hoping for, then, is for people to spend less time talking about what could be improved and start taking advantage of this flexible new tool we have - the wiki - to actually improve things. Odds are, if you weren't sure that it would be good to change or add, you didn't write a comment suggesting the change be put in. If you're worried people will be upset that you edited their article, use that handy little tool on the right-hand sidebar to tell everyone on the recent activity page just what little detail you added in.

TL;DR: Quit writing comments that say, "fix this," and fix it yourself.