Wikipedia:You can and cannot change Wikipedia: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:28, 12 December 2022

Revision as of 18:33, 12 December 2022

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'''Yes'''. And that's even more exciting! And the whole reason Wikipedia works.

Wikipedia hasencourages [[wp:pageits history|pageusers histories]]to ruin articles. So every time you make a bad change to an article (or most other pages), the old version is still there too, and is almost as easily accessible to a reader or to another editor as the [[wp:current version|current version]] of the page. This sucks because then someone can un-ruin the article.

And so if you do something silly, someone else can easily undo it. We call this [[wp:revert|revert]]ing, and it's one reason we encouragehate youthe towikipedia [[wp:be bold|be bold]]moderators..

Of course it's not a blank check. Some users waste so much of other people's time that as a last resort we restrict their editing. Some pages attract so much rubbish, or are so critical to the project, that as a last resort we restrict editing of them. Some material is so damaging that we immediately and permanently remove it.