With respect, that is naive. To demonstrate, create a new account and go ahead and make that change. It will be reverted. Wikipedia is not the democratic free-for-all it once was.
If you do perform that experiment and I am wrong, please come back and let us know.
Wikipedia is and has always been a wiki; reverting bad or controversial edits has always been expected from day one.
Also Wikipedia has developed an editorial line of its own, so it's normal that edits that go against the line will be put in question; if that happens to you, you're expected to collaborate in the talk pages to express your intent for the changes, and possibly get recommendations on how to tweak it so that it sticks.
It also happens that most of contributions by first timers are indistinguishable from vandalism or spam; those are so obvious that an automated bot is able to recognize them and revert them without human supervision, with a very high success rate.
However if those first contributions are genuinely useful to the encyclopedia, such as adding high quality references for an unverified claim, correcting typos, or removing obvious vandalism that slipped through the cracks, it's much more likely that the edits will stay; go ahead and try that experiment and tell us how it went.
> reverting bad or controversial edits has always been expected from day one.
How charming of you to think that the well-meaning contributor is going to happily smile and agree with you when you tell them that their well-meaning contributions are bad.
TuringTest|1 month ago
Also Wikipedia has developed an editorial line of its own, so it's normal that edits that go against the line will be put in question; if that happens to you, you're expected to collaborate in the talk pages to express your intent for the changes, and possibly get recommendations on how to tweak it so that it sticks.
It also happens that most of contributions by first timers are indistinguishable from vandalism or spam; those are so obvious that an automated bot is able to recognize them and revert them without human supervision, with a very high success rate.
However if those first contributions are genuinely useful to the encyclopedia, such as adding high quality references for an unverified claim, correcting typos, or removing obvious vandalism that slipped through the cracks, it's much more likely that the edits will stay; go ahead and try that experiment and tell us how it went.
Timwi|1 month ago
How charming of you to think that the well-meaning contributor is going to happily smile and agree with you when you tell them that their well-meaning contributions are bad.
nephihaha|1 month ago
ejolto|1 month ago
I made an anonymous edit to the Wikipedia page of one of Hemingways short stories three years ago, and my edit is still there.
rendall|1 month ago
>> The list of animals has dolphins and birds but not humans?
> It’s Wikipedia. Make the change you want to see in the page.
Yes, minor changes will not draw negative attention but the days when randos could make major edits like that are long gone.
But try it. Maybe I'm wrong.
nephihaha|1 month ago
throw-qqqqq|1 month ago
Some pages/topics are more open to changes than others, that much is true.