Local Wiki Pages Get Facelift

Hyattsville, Mount Rainier and Brentwood's Wikipedia pages got a facelift last month. The pages recently underwent a series of edits performed by an employee the Hyattsville Community Development Corporation, though not as part of official duties.

Justin Fair, economic development coordinator and web content manager for the Hyattsville CDC, editing under the handle CrazyArtsyGuy, spent two days in early July making a flurry of revisions to the Wikipedia pages for the three towns. The Hyattsville CDC is a nonprofit organization which tries to foster economic development in the city. 

Fair said that the edits were done in his free time. 

"A lot of people look at Wikipedia for some things, and we wanted to make sure that there's a professional face for all the things out there," said Fair in an interview. "As someone interested in learning about local happenings, I hope my efforts have improved our community's Wikipedia pages."

The edits changed the tenor of portions of the Hyattsville's entry on the digital encyclopedia.

A section originally labeled "Recent changes" was edited to read "Revitalization Projects." A paragraph about public art in the city was added, linking back to a public art locator on the Gateway Arts District website. 

Other edits added the names of individual businesses to a paragraph describing the Hyattsville Arts District's commercial core. 

Other changes were structural, tidying up the layout of the pages and breaking blocks of text into sections. 

Fair said he also has encouraged municipalities in the area to edit the Wikipedia pages for their communities. 

This is not the first time that Fair has taken up Wikipedia editing.

Long before he was working for the Hyattsville CDC, Fair has been an occasionally active Wikipedia editor. In 2007, his first edit added a small paragraph describing the environmentally friendly set used in the film Bruce Almighty. In 2008, he added an accent above the "e" in Raven-Symoné's name as it appeared in an article on Stevie Wonder's hit single Superstition, and cleaned up a small section describing the history of Lebanon. He made another small edit to an article about the television show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in 2009. 

For roughly three years, Fair didn't edit at all. In January 2012, Fair-–at the time working for the Gateway Arts Center in Brentwood-–returned to Wikipedia to try to create an entry for the Gateway Arts District, a special zone created by the Legislature which allows local governments to offer tax credits and other incentives for arts related businesses. The Gateway Arts District runs along the southern Route 1 corridor, encompassing Hyattsville, North Brentwood, Brentwood and Mount Rainier. 

So far, Fair has been unsuccessful in getting the Gateway Arts District Wikipedia page approved by the Wikipedia's legion of volunteer curators. It included a section extolling the "attractive qualities" of the area. His first versions were rejected because it was not written in a formal enough tone for the site and did not refer to "a range of independent, reliable published sources."

"One of the issues that I've found, is that they are looking for very impartial information," said Fair. "I may be not impartial enough for their criteria."

This summer, Fair took up the Gateway Arts District Wikipedia entry again. The article was, to the untrained eye, a big improvement over the first version submitted back in January, with a wider range of information and a more detailed explanation of what the arts district was and how it was created. 

But Wikipedia's moderators rejected this one too, saying that it read more like an advertisement than an encyclopedia entry.

Fair said that he believes that the Gateway Arts District merits its own entry, but at the moment there's not much work underway to get the pages up to Wikipedia's standards. The Hyattsville CDC, said Fair, has applied for grant funding which would underwrite efforts to improve the organizations web presence. If approved, some of that money could potentially be used to further revise area Wikipedia pages.