I have never edited a Wikipedia article before, and after doing this once, I quickly realized that it’s a bad task for people who already have OCD tendencies to take up. Clearly, this should not be a hobby of mine.
I chose to edit the entry for Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael, the “prolific Dutch Golden Age landscape painter who lived between 1629-1682.” Why did I choose this article? I was trying to think about what I could edit that wasn’t liable to require too much work on my part. I had written several pages on a Ruisdael painting in my dissertation a few years ago, and somehow his name popped in my head. When I visited the page, I saw that it was relatively sparse, and I figured that I’d have something good to add. At the very least, I could cherry pick some citations and verbiage from my dissertation and plug them in.
After I read the existing article, my main critique is that there was almost no mention of the environmental implications of Ruisdael’s work, and in particular no mention of the political and social matrix from which it was produced. The section of “motifs” lists a bunch of aesthetic tendencies in Ruisdael’s work:
Ruisdael’s favorite subjects are simple woodland scenes, similar to those of Everdingen and Hobbema. He is especially noted as a painter of trees, and his rendering of foliage, particularly of oak leaf age, is characterized by the greatest spirit and precision.
As a point of reference, this information is fine, but it overlooks some important frameworks of Ruisdael’s paintings. I decided to add some information that tells us we should consider Ruisdael’s work as part of the dramatic landscape changes that occurred during (and perhaps even gave rise to) the Dutch Golden Age.
However, once I started editing, I began to realize that not much is intuitive about Wikipedia. You need to read around for a while to figure out how to add citations, link to other articles, create new subject headings, and embed pictures from elsewhere. I believe I was able to grasp this, for the most part, but it’s a testament to the fact that most Wikipedia editors by necessity have a high degree of computer literacy. This certainly cuts off a large segment of the world from making contributions.
Some other things I did to the article include:
- Added a picture of The Jewish Cemetery
- Added some citations to leading scholars on the Dutch Golden Age that weren’t referenced already
- Made some sentence-level edits
- Added a new section on “context”
One of the things I deliberately tried to do was text the limits of the kind of language that will fly in a Wikipedia article. In one paragraph I wrote:
Another characteristic of Ruisdael’s landscapes is a polychronic lament for a stable past coupled with an unease for a profoundly unstable future. For example, in paintings like the Jewish Cemetery, Ruisdael pits a rogue natural world against the built environment, which has been overrun by the trees and shrubs surrounding the cemetery. The broken beech dominating the foreground recalls the elegiac tenor of the Virgilian pastoral; it is a trope that conjures lament for past mistakes made that have produced a present-day derelict landscape. Landscape in Ruisdael becomes a way to explore a search for an unambiguous epistemology and an uncorrupted nature.
There’s certainly some interpretive claims being made in these sentences, which calls attention to the intrinsic challenge of writing “objective” language about anything, even if it’s a Dutch Landscape artist who has been dead for hundreds of years. I’m interested to see if the changes I made stand.