PESWiki:Who writes PESWiki
From PESWiki
Unlike other resources, the volunteer authors of articles in PESWiki don't have to be experts or scholars, although some certainly are. They can be anyone, including you!
Volunteers do not need to go through any formal process before creating a new article or editing an existing article. Many people have created or edited articles in PESWiki. They come from countries all around the world, from all ages and backgrounds. Anyone who contributes to this resource is called a "PESWikin" or "Wiki."
It is PESWiki policy to add to the resource only statements that are verifiable. The PESWiki style guide encourages editors to cite sources. Sometimes PESWikins do not follow these policies, because they forget or because they are not aware of the policy. Then readers of the article cannot be sure that a statement is verifiable.
Many users of PESWiki consult the page history of an article in order to assess the number of people that have contributed to the article. An article can be considered more likely to be accurate when it has been edited by many different people (since most edits are constructive changes, rather than destructive ones). You may also consult the talk page of any article to see what other readers and editors have to say about it.
One list of articles that have been edited by many people is the list of featured articles. These articles are considered to be of high quality when they are granted featured article status, and if later edits reduce the quality of the page, a user can nominate an article for removal from that special status.
The best way to decide whether a particular statement is accurate is to find independent, reliable sources to affirm that statement, such as books, magazine articles, television news reports, trade journals, or web sites. For more guidance on evaluating the accuracy of PESWiki articles, see PESWiki:Researching with PESWiki.
How PESWikins improve articles
Whenever a reader finds something in an article which he or she doesn't think should be there, that person can edit the article and help make PESWiki more accurate and useful. Someone may place a notice at the top of the article indicating that it needs to be cleaned up. It is also possible to create a new article to share information that is not already in PESWiki.
When they first hear about PESWiki, many people think that articles are created by people adding a few words at a time. Many edits are very minor, and just fix spelling, rephrase, or add a fact or two. But some editors who are interested in a particular subject contribute paragraphs or whole articles at a time; these editors might be anyone from a professor in the field, to a hobbyist, to a person who just wants to fill a hole in the resource.
Assembling text piece by piece doesn't necessarily take into account the bigger picture, so sometimes an editor will reorganize an article, or rewrite it, keeping the same facts, but making them flow more smoothly. Material also sometimes needs to be moved into other articles, for any of these reasons: if it's been put in the wrong place, if one article has become too big and needs to be split up, if two articles on the same subject have accidentally been created, or if there are many small articles that need to be combined into one larger one. Profanity is usually removed immediately.
