I never knew Wikipedia was so much socially contributed encyclopedia. I was looking for key missing info in the wiki for CAN-FD Transfer Protocol (TP) header ?. Though it’s very technical which no-one usually turns to Wiki for the help, yet I found another very technical article about CAN bus Transfer Protocol (TP) which is as technical as ISO standard itself. To my surprise, Wiki had such unexpected technical information for one but not the other.
Later when I found the information for CANFD TP ?, I thought it’s a good idea to ask the responsible person to add it to the Wiki page. Amazingly then I came to know the real workflow of the wiki as,
Wikipedia is socially contributed and there is no one single ownership of any article.
-My own realization.
I went through the contribution details and astonished to see a lot of articles were started to edit as back as 10-15 years ? and still actively updated. Moreover, the changes are revision controlled, you can go back and see any older version before anyone changed it.
Being a blogger for a good few times, I jumped to contribute my new finding. I updated ✍️ the existing article to accommodate missing items. In the way, it reinforced a good few realizations ? in me
- I can be wrong. Wiki is socially contributed, I can be wrong and there will be experts in that article history-line to correct me if I’m wrong.
- I may not trust all information in Wiki anymore, because if some articles are not written by experts or not verified by experts, then likely it’s not reliable (if you remember the square braces [1] [2], etc.. with which wiki verifies).
- Most importantly ❗, I had a sense of high social responsibility. The article I’m writing is going to be viewed & trusted by the wider community than my tiny little blog. So the information I put in should be concise, precise, and long-lasting.
- Calls me back to update it as and when I find the more precise info. Because now after few days of contribution, I think my new finding should go to a new article all together ISO15765-2:2015 than just append to an existing one.
Have you contributed any to the wiki? What was your sense while contributing such a huge crowd?
Ajay is a professional developer and architect of NI-LabVIEW applications with extreme interest in getting the hardware connected to LabVIEW and automating the stuff. Recently he is also putting his hands in NI-TestStand to get very dirty on it. He is also a good mentor for the various interns in his career. He is ready to help the people in techie roles.