I Look Pretty Young But I'm Just Back-dated

[moon_custafer]

Due to having recently read a_t_rain's story the other day, I looked up John Heminges' name online and noticed that the Wikipedia entry gave his birth year as 1556, which would have made him thirty-two when he married Rebecca Knell who was sixteen at the time. Startled, I looked at some of the other dates given in the article: that birthdate would also have made him thirty-one at the time he qualified as a freeman of the Grocers' Company, even though he's described as having served a nine-year apprenticeship beginning age twelve.

Checking the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online got a birth year of 1566, which made way more sense, so I went into Wikipedia editing and fixed it (it actually had 1566 already in the header code, the typo was only in a few places).

Comments

[a_t_rain]

Ooh, thanks! I'd caught quite a while ago that there was a discrepancy between Wikipedia and other sources, and that 1566 seemed to be (pretty clearly) his actual birthdate, but it didn't occur to me that editing Wikipedia was ... something I could actually do? I guess, in my head, it's something you can only do if you have a user account and all kinds of knowledge about how not to step on other people's toes, and I have no idea if that's actually true or not.

[moon_custafer]

No, iirc the whole premise of Wikipedia is that anybody can edit it— I think there might be higher-level editors who look over recent edits to check for any obvious trolling. I suspect that in practice, this means mistakes that get into the less-visited pages tend to linger longer.

[a_t_rain]

I guess I was kind of assuming it had become divorced from that premise in practice? I mean, every time I look at one of the talk pages, it seems like it's full of people getting in really intense kerfuffles that involve flinging around oacronyms at each other and referencing what seems to be a very well-worked out set of norms, and I suppose I thought, "oh, so a specialized Editor Class has emerged, and here is what it looks like." (I may be way too shy about breaking into online communities, in general!)

[moon_custafer]

I wondered if I'd have to ask somebody to approve it, but the site just let me make the correction -- there was a field where I was prompted to give my reason for the edit, but it was simple enough to explain.