Complete Story
WANTED: Co-Editors for Wikipedia Articles About Career Development
By Pete Hubbard
Imagine that you just wrote an article about "career development" (CD) for a notable encyclopedia publisher. Compare your article with the Wikipedia article on "career development". I think you will agree with me that your imaginary article is much more accurate and useful than the Wikipedia article. If you are willing to spend the time and energy needed to transform your imaginary article into a real Wikipedia article, then first you will need to read this article and learn about Wikipedia before becoming a co-editor.
What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". It is a very popular resource with almost 684 million visitors per year and 75,000 co-editors of almost 2.5 million English articles. Wikipedia has strengths and weaknesses, such as suffering from omissions, misinformation and vandalism. This is due to the large voluntary contributor base which allows anyone to edit articles. However, the broad assessments of Wikipedia's reliability and value are generally positive. Visitors have learned to use it as starting point and follow-up by checking the information rather than accepting something at face value.
A Scenario of a Teachable Moment
On June 18, 2008, Laura and hundreds of others want an answer to the question "What is career development?" Laura does a Google search for "career development" (in quotes) and gets 11 million results. On the first page of those results, she found a link to the NCDA home page and a link to the Wikipedia article on "career development". Laura checks out the Wikipedia article first and probably thinks the article is accurate and complete. She does not notice the "stub" warning at the bottom which means that Wikipedia reviewers think the article needs significant expansion. Laura decides to check out some of the other links in the Google results page. Upon viewing the NCDA web site, Laura does not find an obvious link to the answer to the question, "What is career development?"
While the above is a scenario, on that June date, 243 people actually clicked on Wikipedia's career development page. We - the career development community - missed a teachable moment that would have accurately answered Laura's and 242 other reader's question. Most career development professionals will agree that what Laura and others read on the Wikipedia career development page was sadly lacking in terms of accuracy and completeness.
The Opportunity to Teach
The Wikipedia article on "career development" is inadequate and does not reflect the best that the career development community has to offer. The "career development" article was created in 2003 and has remained essentially unchanged, even after 300 edit attempts by over 50 editors as chronicled in the "history" page for this article. We can change that by finding and encouraging career professionals who have the time, energy and interest to collaborate as co-editors of this and other Wikipedia articles. Editing will not be easy because:
- Wikipedia has very strict guidelines that few people will be willing to spend the time to learn.. A prominent NCDA career professional tried to add a simple sentence and it was rejected because that person did not take the time to learn what edits were appropriate.
- Management (reversing edits and discussing/negotiating edits) can become time-consuming and potentially (very) annoying.
Why should we take this as an opportunity to teach? A portion of NCDA's mission statement stipulates that NCDA will provide "service to the public and professionals ... including ... public information, professional standards, advocacy ..." These career related Wikipedia articles are a form of advocacy for career development and they are viewed around the world by thousands of people. We must use and improve this resource so that readers learn and master career development and its related skills.
Do You Want To Be A Co-Editor?
If you are interested in helping, please see these instructions. The challenge is to
- find career professionals who have the interest, time, patience, and energy to learn1 how to develop and maintain Wikipedia articles,
- then learn how to transform the WP "career development" article from a stub article into one that provides appropriate encyclopedic coverage of the subject,
- then, maybe someday, learn how to transform that article into a featured article2 and possibly a portal using the Education portal as a model.
If you agree that Wikipedia is a popular and useful resource and that the Wikipedia article on career development is inadequate, then you are an interested member of the career development community that should organize to support each other as co-editors of these articles.
Additional resources
1 Here are a few of the links to the guide to starting your first article, a tutorial and a list of policies and policies and guidelines.
2 Read this marvelous post about students who were given the assignment to create a featured article in Wikipedia.
See also this forum on the Career Development Forums discussion board for current information about this project.
Pete Hubbard is the Founder of LifeWork Planning Services, and CD Forums (formerly NCDA Forums), member of three NCDA committees, Chair of the ACSCI Public Relations committee, and (co-)author of three other Career Convergence articles. Pete received the 2005 NCDA Presidential Recognition Award for his work on NCDA Forums. More info is available at http://lifeworkps.com/hubbard/weblog/3737.html or by emailing Pete at hubbard@waypt.com.
