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I strongly believe in the massive potential of a curated collection of human knowledge in encyclopedic form, collectively edited and maintained by the meta-civilization that it attempts to describe.
Since I first flipped through Britannica or Compton's or World Book—or even Encarta— as a child, I've often been irked by the inevitable typos, awkward usage and other inconsistencies that can make encyclopedia articles difficult to read—and in particular, difficult to skim, which is kind of the point. I imagine that an encyclopedia—large, unwieldy and constantly changing—is just really difficult to edit, through no fault of anybody at all.
There are much smarter, much more dedicated people around here who write substantive Wikipedia content. I am satisfied to largely leave that to you, and to focus on cleaning up grammatical and typographical errors and awkward phrasing in an attempt to make this astounding project more readable and more useful.
When my edits become closer to substantive changes, it is often due to my desire to eliminate linguistic assumptions around physical/mental/intellectual ability or disability. I dislike terms such as "confined to a wheelchair" or "suffered from asthma." The authors of these statements almost certainly mean no harm, but they are not factual unless it has been confirmed by some source that the subject actually feels this way about his or her condition. I absolutely agree that there is such a thing as too much political correctness, but an encyclopedia seems to be an awfully good place for some pedantry if it will provide room for those who are frequently labeled by others to instead describe themselves as they choose. A person who uses a wheelchair probably exits it occasionally throughout the day—he or she probably sleeps in a bed, for example. A person with asthma may have separately reached the pinnacle of human achievement in some unrelated way, and the notion of suffering may rarely or never cross his or her mind.
When I'm editing, I am a little more careful around terms such as deaf, blind, autistic, asthmatic, diabetic, alcoholic, addict, hemophiliac, quadra/parapalegic, etc. These are labels. Sometimes people are okay with being described using labels, but other times they are not. Context, and the language that subjects have used when interacting with the secondary sources that we reference, is important. As a person with type 1 diabetes, I do not like being called "a diabetic." It's almost as bad as being told that I "suffer from" diabetes. For the sake of brevity, it's not awful when my condition is used as a descriptor ("he is diabetic"), especially among others in the same situation ("us diabetics"), but really, when a stranger is referring to me or to people like me, the nice way to do it is to call me a "person with diabetes," just as one would describe a person wearing headphones or a person walking a dog on the other side of the tennis courts.
