Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/Copy editing article text

You can help with another simple thing anyone can help with: At least anyone who has good spelling, a good grasp of grammar in a language, can help copy-edit, or proofread, the article. Text articles on Wikipedia often have typos, grammatical mistakes, or an un-encyclopedic tone. We'll get to that.

And by the way, the reason is not necessarily that whoever wrote the article is a bad speller or something. The wiki allows people to edit each other's work, right? So very often someone would write a correct paragraph, and then someone else would make an edit to half a sentence, not noticing that it has created an ungrammatical sentence now. So that's another way mistakes can happen.

English language mistakes or whatever language mistakes can accumulate on the wiki. And if you encounter such a mistake, even while reading, you can simply hit the edit button, correct that one tiny mistake, and hit Save. And that's an edit. This may be obvious to some of you who have been around and already editing. You may already realize that you can make this sort of correction, but I'm listing it here as something that you could literally spend all your editing career doing without ever writing a whole new article from start to finish. And that's an absolutely useful and great way to contribute on Wikipedia. In fact, on English Wikipedia at least, there are guides on how to do this and how to fix and what to do about questionable cases, etc.

I encourage you, if this is something that you feel you would enjoy doing, to read these guides. There's even a page called the Guild of Copy Editors, which is the place serious copy editors hang out and it has projects of the month, and little badges you can put on your user page, and it's like a support group of people doing copy editing on English Wikipedia.

Again, if that's something you find yourself attracted to, if you are punctilious and a good speller, or have a good strong grasp of grammar, either in English or in whatever language Wikipedia you're working in, you can contribute in this way quite significantly.

I wanted to touch on what does an encyclopedic tone mean. So, the encyclopedia has to be written from a neutral point of view. I'm sure most of you have already encountered this term. A neutral point of view is the appropriate tone for an encyclopedia, and we have a whole module dedicated to it starting next week, module three. So we will talk then about what does neutral point of view mean and how do we achieve it.

But if you encounter an article that *isn't* written from a neutral point of view, that is promotional or biased, or gives undue weight to certain things, doesn't sound right, doesn't sound like an encyclopedia, you can fix that as well. So it's not just about spelling or grammar mistakes.