I find myself editing articles a lot more nowadays. Recently I was looking up some info on the Great Leap Forward and i was curious what the estimated death counts were listed as on Wikipedia. Of course they were all over the place, but mainly in the beginning and death count section were listed as 30 to 55 million. However, I knew this wasnt correct, as I had previously read a paper on an analysis that mentioned 15 million among the lowest estimates. So I edited 15 to 55 million throughout the whole article and added the estimates and academic sources for both 15 and 18 million excess death estimates. Just remember to always keep an eye on this kind of stuff cause wikipedia influences a lot of ppl in these sort of articles, and its easy enough to do edits if you know something is off or missing other info!

  • Melon [she/her,they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    There's actually a Wikipedia rule called "ignore all rules" specifically for these situations. If a rule gets in the way of making a positive change, ignore it.

    There's also a rule against "owning" a page by intentionally curating every facet of it.

    Despite the decent rules, Wikipedia is dominated by Western busybody nerds who can't think of better things to do. Bringing things to the talk page is often a dead end, there's often a cadre of dorks waiting around to come up with reasons to exclude things. Sometimes it helps, popular articles on science aren't manipulated by the horde of creationists that want to Jesify everything.