In an attempt to broaden my involvement with the gaming community, I decided to try joining the Wikipedia community. While there are a lot of more focused wiki’s on gaming, Wikipedia is the original and is still most often the first result on a Google search, so that’s where I decided to start and I want to tell you guys my experience. During my time browsing various pages related to games and other gaming topics, I actually found it a bit refreshing. I’m sure that some of you reading will understand when I say that the gaming community can be quite toxic at times. Or maybe all the time. Especially on some of the more popular gaming websites and their forums. However, because of how Wikipedia is set up and how it works, generally only facts get posted on to each Wikipedia page and these facts are most often backed up with a source. This elimination of opinion and theories and posting of mainly facts helps keep each individual page of a topic clean and informative without bringing a whole lot of unnecessary controversy.
Unfortunately, this lack of opinion on Wikipedia has honestly left me without much to input when I tried to join in and contribute. Of course I could try scouring the internet for missed facts or to try creating a page for something just immediately announced, but I felt like my time would be better spent elsewhere. Especially since I get the feeling that some people like to update Wikis as soon as they hear about something and I don’t want to make updating Wiki pages a competition of who can submit the fastest.
So basically I chose the article for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, a remake of a game I enjoyed that was recently released, and edited the article to have more internal links which was quite easy once you learn the basics of the code behind it. The source code for the article may look daunting on some of the more well established articles, but for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth page, it was quite simple and easy to read.
What I took from my experience in trying to join into the gaming community of Wikipedia was that if you want to contribute actually content, you’ll need to be quick and back up all of your claims with sources. Otherwise it’ll most likely get deleted and replaced by someone who does update with sources. But thankfully this results in pages with facts and all excess nonsense to go away, and considering that Wikipedia is most often one of the top results of a Google search, this is a good thing and I’m grateful for it.
The Player's Lounge 