Bold Edits
Though I’m a Wikipedia editor, I’m an inexperienced one. This morning, I noticed Wikipedia had posted some warnings about an article I was reading. One link lead to another and I came to the Wikipedia editor Be bold page.
We would like everyone to be bold and help make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia. How many times have you read something and thought — Why doesn’t this page have correct spelling, proper grammar, or a better layout?
Wikipedia’s made a cultural choice to endorse participation.
In the time it takes to write about the problem, you could instead improve the encyclopedia. Wikipedia not only lets you add and edit articles: it wants you to do it.
It’s common to hear culture is perfectly designed to achieve the results we are getting. When cultures bar organizational change by hierarchy, unnecessary policies, and rigid change process, they promote the exact qualities that reduce excellence.
The admonition to Be Bold is an organizational endorsement and a personal (daily) choice. When both are present in equal measure, great things happen.
Be Bold, today. Careful, but bold.
I can hear Wikipedia naysayers who point to it’s errors. They fail to see that it is one of the largest altruistic endeavors in human history. It might also be asked of the naysayers: What are you doing at scale to Edit a better world? What sources do you regularly cite in your creative work?
H/T to Seth Godin. This morning’s blog post from Seth Godin was titled Glib. You could be forgiven if - instead of thinking about the word Glib - you thought about the GLib C software library. I did exactly that. After all, the spelling is the same. I wonder if Wikipedia should have a disambiguation page for glib versus GLib?
