Since most people know of or have at least heard of Wikipedia I won't really go into it in my post but if you are interested Kelsey Rolof has a blog post that gives some basic facts about the website and how information is added and edited.
What I want to talk about was the process of editing a WikiStub that including finding a good stub, analyzing what information was already there, thinking of what information to add, adding the information.
Step 1. Finding a Good Stub
When wondering what stub to edit and how I found it the task seemed daunting at first since there are 19 million articles on Wikipedia! So where to start? There were two main methods that I found to be the best: 1) think of a topic you know about and simply search it up, 2) go through the organized WikiStub lists to narrow down what you might be interested in and see what articles have already been started.
I chose to look up Linneolated Parakeets since I know a lot about the species, especially as pets, since I own two of my own. I've attached a picture of them for your viewing pleasure:
Step 2. What information is already there?
I read my Wiki article first and analyzed it thinking: "What has already been said?"
After I did that I started thinking first about if there were any major sections missing or if there was anything not said in the existing in the existing sections in the article. I added a few small edits for existing sections but added a whole section on speech in Linnies since I know they can be very skilled talkers and love to imitate noises.
Step 3. Add your information
This is fairly self explanatory but you do need to remember to find references so your information is more creditable Even though I already knew what I was saying to be true I cited my bird behavior book since that is where I originally learned about bird speech training.
Here is a screenshot of the stub I edited about Linnies:
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