 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Wikipedia is, as everyone knows, "The Free Encyclopedia anyone can edit". Therefore, it also means that unlike almost any other format, if you see something that is either:
- Wrong
- Misspelt
- Poorly worded
...or anything else, for that matter, instead of pointing out a problem, why not just click on the "edit" button and do it yourself?
It's common to see article talk pages or candidacies for Good or Featured article listing every spelling or grammatical mistake which would have been much easier to simply correct. Catch-all boilerplate tags can also often find themselves being slapped on articles in lieu of any effort to fix the problem. As User:Hobit noted:
 | An editor thinks something might be wrong with this page. That editor won't actually make any effort to fix it, but can rest assured that they've done their encyclopedic duty by sticking on a tag. Please allow this tag to languish indefinitely at the top of the page, since nobody knows exactly what the tagging editor was worked up about. |
Wikipedia editors are called that for a reason; one of our key policies is to be bold – in other words, "If you see something that can be improved, improve it". It's only through doing this that Wikipedia will get better.
Nobody does Wikipedia for the glory – editors don't even get to claim an authorship credit on an article, even if they've spent hours writing it and it's now a far better resource than any credited book, website or newspaper. However, by everybody mucking in when they spot something that needs changing or correcting, we should be able to end up achieving our objective of creating a collaborative, free, open encyclopedia.
Therefore, if you see something that ought to be changed for the good of the project, just do it yourself.