Tate’s Hell Forest is located in the Florida Panhandle, extends through 212,645 acres through Franklin and Liberty counties, and it was originally established for timber production. Currently, it is home to many species of wildlife and is mainly maintained for conservation purposes.
While looking at the Wikipedia page about Tate’s, I noticed the acreage was incorrectly stating it was only 202,000 acres and erroneously stated that the forest was a park. While there are camping areas and other recreational areas inside the forest, it is not considered a State Park.
I decided it was important to correct those errors, but there was one small problem: this was my first time editing anything on Wikipedia, and I wasn’t sure how to go about it.
I have always viewed Wikipedia as a community of smart people that really care about accuracy and fact checking; and making those changes on the page seemed like a huge and intimidating task. I was worried I would get attacked and called names, even though Wikipedia strongly encourages respectful conversations as one of their five pillars.
I used the talk page to explain my intentions and reason for the changes and waited for a response.
The Tate’s Hell State Forest page is very small and based on the little conversation found on the “talk” space, I didn’t really expect a response, but I still waited.
After a couple of days of no replies, I decided to go ahead and make the edits.
Figuring out the editing part of Wikipedia was a little overwhelming. I have no knowledge about coding, and it felt like I had too much access to something I could very easily mess up. Nonetheless, I went ahead and edited the page and I’m proud to say that the acreage now displayed on the Tate’s Hell State Forest Wikipedia page is accurately 212, 645 acres.
After going through the process of editing a Wikipedia page, I have much more appreciation for Wiki editors and the community. It was easy for me to find an article, look for an error and correct it, but it made me think about the people that go through the whole process of starting a new page and adding new information that was not available before.
In the same way I never considered where soil comes from, and simply accepted that it just exists, I never considered where the information available online came from.
Wikipedia is one of the first results you get when googling anything, and I dare say everyone has used the information readily available on there at some point, without really thinking about the hard work and dedication that must’ve taken place.
Wikipedia always got a bad reputation from schoolteachers, and it was always made out to be a terrible place with inaccurate information that wasn’t even worth looking into. I will never know if they really didn’t understand how Wikipedia works and how it can be very useful, or if they didn’t trust that we could learn how to use it properly; but I do hope the overall perspective on Wikipedia has changed and that people can truly appreciate this wonderful encyclopedia.
Oh, and by the way, soil is formed by breakdown of different organic materials over time.