This is a post about updates made to the Human Right to Water and Sanitation page on Wikipedia. Some great strides were made as part of the SuSanA Edit-a-thon. I put a strike-through through changes that were made on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation Talk page under the "Further improvements..." sub-heading.

What was done?

• Elisabeth set in motion the name change. The page used to be called Human Right to Water. She was finally able to get approval to change the name to Human Right to Water and Sanitation.
• I made editorial/grammatical changes to the article. I updated the "Introduction," "International Context," and "Legal Foundations" sections. These sections took a surprisingly long time (almost two whole days) because there were some factual errors, and the material was not reader friendly.
• I double-checked references to the above sections, and removed inaccurate ones.
• I made sure the chronology of the resolutions was clearly noted in the article, and specified the difference between the 2010 and 2015 resolutions.
• I haven't done it yet, but am planning on finishing the "Critiques/Alternatives" section referencing the scholars listed on the Talk page.

What still needs to be done?

• Basic editorial/grammatical changes needed to the rest of the article starting with the section "International Jurisprudence."
• The "International Context" section could be updated to have more of a focus on sanitation.
• A section could be added on Human Right to Water and Sanitation actions/movements.
• Cross links need to be added from other articles to this article. For example, it could be more prominently displayed in the "Human Rights" article. There are also many other articles that could be linked to this article. Please see the conversation on the Talk page under the "Linking to this article" section for more information.

This is all very helpful. Thank you so much. Apparently, I already broke the "external link" rule so I am glad you reminded me about that. I will go back and remove those, and instead add them as references. Whoops. I will also fix my profile page.

It's hard to give a rule for that but I had a quick look at your edits and they are totally fine (in fact great!), just continue along those lines. As you are editing in small steps and explaining each of your changes it is very easy to follow what you're doing, so this is great. Let's see if other Wikipedians react in the next few days (but this article is watched by fewer than 30 people).

If you have time today, just keep on going like you are doing.

A couple of hints:

• The lead should be a summary of the entire article. It should be at the most 4 paragraphs long. There should not be any external links in the lead, or anywhere else in the article, apart from the section at the very end with say "external links".
• Perhaps add some information on your Wikipedia user page? You don't have to reveal any private information or not who you are or anything but just to give people some pointers. Here you see my user page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EMsmile

You can then add this template {{User WikiProject Sanitation}} to your userpage. That code can be pasted in if you use the source editor, not VisualEditor.

This is a question for you Joe or you Elisabeth (or anyone with the answer).

I started editing the " Human right to water " page today on Wikipedia. There are a lot of problems with grammar and content (not linking to appropriate material, not including all resolutions for human rights, etc.).

I am taking your advice to only make small changes each time, and haven't made many so far. I am worried if I make too many edits that they will all be reverted. What do you suggest is a reasonable number of edits to make to one page in one day? Thanks in advance for any input here.

Thanks Elisabeth. I appreciate you giving me all of this additional information. It is very helpful. Now I have a clear path forward for using the "talk page" appropriately. I hope your name change is accepted, and I will add my information to the "talk page" in the morning.

Hi Abby,

I have put the title change process in motion, see the tag here at the very bottom of the talk page:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Right_to_wate...d_move_16_March_2017

It also shows up here now: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requeste...ons#March_16.2C_2017
If there are no objections the move should be complete at the latest 7 days from now.

I agree with you that the talk page of the article on "right to water" is surprisingly sparce. Let's change that!

I suggest that you group your contributions on the talk page by structuring it with a few headers. Or you could provide a bullet point list of planned changes which you put under a heading like this:

== Major overhaul on the occasion of World Water Day March 2017 ==

Yes, the talk page is the right place for either announcing planned changes, or - if you run out of time later - for things that you think someone else should change but you don't have the time for right now. "Rome wasn't created in a day", and neither are these Wikipedia articles. They keep on improving over time thanks to people like you and all the other volunteers!

I am so happy that you're tackling this article and hope that by writing here on the forum we might get other SuSanA members interested to join you.

Regards,
Elisabeth

P.S. Yea, there is so much going on behind the scenes at Wikipedia! "Enclosed inter-web society" is an interesting term. It's all in the interest of quality assurance. Imagine how hard it must be to have good solid articles on Wikipedia on currently controversial topics like Syria, Islam, terrorist, Donald Trump, homosexuality, trans-gender ... Compared to that, our WASH topics are so much easier!

Thanks for sharing this information, Elisabeth. First, please go ahead and change the name (if possible).

Second, I would like to copy my suggestions over to the talk page. That page is actually surprisingly sparse. Do you suggest that I only add a few suggestions at a time for the talk page and/or is that only for the actual edits on the article?

Third, your tips of the day are helpful. I had no idea how much like an enclosed inter-web society Wikipedia was... but I suppose it is necessary to have order there to make sure these articles are not completely hacked with misinformation.

Finally, our little team of two probably won't have time to do all necessary changes, but we can at least focus on the introduction, add a section on critiques, add a plethora of references, talk about Catarina/Leo, and link to the resolutions and talk about the evolution of the rights. We can add other ideas to the talk page.

If you hear of anyone else interested in the same topic, just send them our way.

Thanks, Joe. You're absolutely right to advise against working offline for too long and then copying large pieces of text across into Wikipedia in one go.

Abby: I am so happy that you're going ahead with this. Your Google doc is fine when you collect your initial thoughts with co-workers, but as soon as possible I would say move your deliberations across to the talk page of the article so that other Wikipedians can partake. Here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Right_to_water

I will also write about that later today as my Tip of the Day 5. (have my Tips 1-4 been helpful so far? See here: forum.susana.org/component/kunena/213-wo...it=12&start=12#20860 )

We also mentioned here that saving frequently is really important while working in Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/S...ide#Wikipedia_basics

I've looked into changing the title of the Wikipedia article. I think I found out how to do it:
It might be easier if I place this request here (rather than you), as I have already a solid reputation on Wikipedia (article title changes can be controversial and are to be avoided, in general):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requeste...l_technical_requests

It is bound to be uncontroversial as I already wrote about it on the talk page in September 2015 and there have been no objections.

So just to confirm, shall we change it from "Right to water" to
"Human right to water and sanitation"?

I would say yes.
Note that it's easy to place redirects for any alternative names like "Right to water", "Right to sanitation" to the new title.

And I agree with you that a separate article on "Right to sanitation" would not be so useful as there would be too much repetition and overlap with the article on "Right to water" (as you explained here in this post: forum.susana.org/component/kunena/62-wg-...it=12&start=48#20873).

Regards,
Elisabeth

Good points. I will share them with the small team. Perhaps we can move some of our background discussions over to the talk page. Thanks.

My advice would be to edit the page a line at a time. If someone later wants to query or change any para in particular, that can be identified. If you add several paragraphs of text in one go (ie in one edit), you'll probably see it removed quite quickly because that's usually a sign that someone is copy-pasting from elsewhere.

No problem with collaborating on what you're going to be changing, but I'd have thought this is better done on the talkpage.

Hi Joe. Thanks for your comments about making many changes at once. That might be something good to mention to SuSanA - the organizers of the Edit-a-thon. I am just a participant, but imagine that there will be many changes made during the few days of the Edit-a-thon to many pages.

RE: Leo Heller. We agree with you, and previously listed that as an action item on our working document.

Just to clarify, the working document is for our internal use only. We are just using it to work collaboratively (as a team) to identify changes that need to be made to the page. We are not going to import it to Wikipedia. It is, rather, only a collaborative checklist. Perhaps I shouldn't have linked it to my last message? Maybe it was confusing?

Best. Abby

No, but I'd suggest there ought to be some reference to Léo Heller, the current Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/WaterAndSanitati...Pages/LeoHeller.aspx

As a general comment, you might run into problems on wikipedia if you make a very large amount of edits in one go. I'm not sure working on a google doc which you then import into wikipedia is a very good idea.

But I'm not going to be contributing to this edit-a-thon, so good luck with it.