Developmental editing requires an intelligent intervention in someone else's writing. Developmental editing is called developmental because it pushes writing to develop in ways that it wouldn't if left simply to the content matter experts or other writers. When considering Wikipedia, we can separate out a few of these skills.
- An understanding of Wikipedia both as a community and a series of mechanisms imperfectly designed for quality control
Despite attempts to lower the barriers to entry, nearly any substantial contribution to Wikipedia requires some understanding of how Wikipedia operates both as a community and as a means of regulating edits and ensuring quality of articles. To address the more developmental editing issues we're highlighting here, a particularly rigorous understanding of these standards is needed.
To some extent, these standards are designed to give grounds for quickly assessing individual edits, primarily for filtering out inappropriate edits. As broader editing guidelines, however, there is much more ambiguity. From this perspective, policies and standards function primarily as a common ground for guiding discussions and efforts. Thus, editors don't just need to know the standards but must be able to think about why and how those standards function so that the editor might be able to address the particular issues involved while avoiding the other issues that caused articles to stall.
- A capacity to work diplomatically within that writing situation
Editing is never performed in a vacuum; editing always occurs in a community of writers, content matter experts, and readers. While this may seem obviously true, it is particularly significant and apparent on Wikipedia. As seasoned Wikipedians are well aware, substantial editing requires one to contend diplomatically with other writers, both current and future. There are a host of reasons one must work diplomatically on Wikipedia, particularly to address these substantial developmental editing issues: New editors are still learning the rules of contributing; seasoned editors are often sensitive about issues they keep encountering; some writers may be understandably yet inappropriately possessive about articles they have worked on; content matter experts might hold their own expertise above appropriate writing in this genre; and so on. On top of all this, most contributors are only assisting in their spare time, with varying degrees of investment and interest, often with many priorities other than the improvement of Wikipedia.
Having your writing edited is intimidating in any situation, but the complexities of Internet anonymity, the particularities of Wikipedia standards, the fact that edits are immediately published and live, and the high profile and public nature of this writing can make this editing extra intimidating. Therefore, extra diplomacy and care is needed to push articles in productive directions. We discuss this problem in relation to teaching in Part 2.
- A thorough eye for the writing issues and ambiguities involved
The issues raised in our list of stalled articles require both attention and skill to identify. Articles that need more content or sources are easy enough to identify; while those articles may take significant writing and research to remedy, a new level and kind of editing is required if or when an article runs into the issues that may cause them to stall. While some articles might fall into a good structure, focus, content, and tone through incremental editing, certainly many articles won't.
What issues are we talking about specifically? Those that require bold changes, such as reorganization, refocusing, and resituating (discussed in the next section). Such issues require a willingness and capacity to work with the ambiguities involved in such questions and issues. Again, in these cases, there are no clear or certain answers; if there were, they would have easily been fixed. Therefore, particular kinds of communication and assessment are also needed to handle the ambiguities involved.
- Willingness and capacity to discuss problems clearly
Wikipedians will often discuss many things on the talk pages, on userpages, and in forums. However, in our experience, it is surprising how rare it is to find substantial discussions of these writing issues on talk pages. The most substantial discussions about pages usually occur on nominations for Good Article or Featured Article status, but an article that has stalled is less likely to be developed enough to be nominated for this assessment.
It seems clear that many, if not all, the issues discussed in our overview of stalled articles require some kind of discussion. At the least, they require such significant revision that editors should note the changes on the talk page. Doing so could document the significant intervention so that past editors of the page understand what the editor has done to their contributions, so that current editors see what changes were made and why, and so that future editors can be informed about what issues have already been raised. Given that less substantial edits or the addition of new content or sources does not usually need much more than an edit summary, such discussion is what talk pages are primarily for.
In our experience in trying to encourage discussion remedying these developmental issues, it can be hard to succinctly and usefully highlight writing issues. It is equally difficult to explain substantial edits responding to these developmental editing problems. We suggest that this lack of discussion is representative of a widespread challenge of speaking about high-level writing tasks. Thus, we would like to suggest that Wikipedia provides an opportunity to study and consider more carefully possible techniques for tuning other writers into writing issues so that they understand our changes, can work with our suggestions, provide helpful feedback, and guide future edits.
- Editing confidence (boldness!)
Stalled articles need an intervention, and these interventions require confidence and a sure hand from the editor. Such interventions fit firmly within Wikipedia's declaration to be bold, but a particular form of boldness is needed here. High-level editing requires the willingness to take existing writing and completely rework it, pose difficult questions and problems to the community, and make changes that are more facilitation than contribution, even if they seem like a step backwards. For example, one might delete some parts of an article or add a mostly blank section to make way for new kinds of content.
These kind of bold edits require that editors be comfortable not knowing the right answer while still being able to see and formulate the editing questions more clearly than others have been able to. Given the editing community, one must also be willing to make mistakes and change opinions depending on what comes out in the editing and communication process.
- A respect for the process and timeline involved
All editing, but especially Wikipedia editing, takes place over time and involves many contributors with varying degrees of interest, time, and knowledge. Developmental editing on Wikipedia must operate within a prolonged process of editing. While some articles might be created through significant and extensive work by one or a few editors in a short time, many articles need the assistance of many edits over time. To perform developmental editing on Wikipedia, one must consider this whole process and respect that editing does not necessarily happen on your timeline. Anything you might do or say might not be resolved for a while. The outcomes and timeline largely depend on when people happen to be available and find their way to the article. Only a limited number of issues have urgency.
Indeed, Wikipedia articles are never finished, although they can find their way into Good Article (GA) or Featured Article (FA) status. One criteria for GA or FA is that the editing stabilizes since not all articles will need to continue changing after achieving a particular state. However, even these articles will likely continue to change and develop. If an article is already in a good state, with substantial material, appropriate content, and sensible organization, then future developments will have a good model and structure for adding new content.
Thus, part of what is interesting in editing, working, and teaching with Wikipedia, is that it provides us with a kind of long-term view of writing and editing. One of the most interesting things to do on Wikipedia is to look through the history of an article to see how an article evolves over time. Doing so gives you a sense of just how much work goes into making any article.