I had never thought about being a Wikipedia editor before, it was a topic that had never crossed my mind, which is why I was so surprised when in class we were assigned the task of editing a Wikipedia page. Many concerns came to me at that time: “What do I have to say that hasn’t already been said?”, “Who am I to decide whether someone else’s work can be improved or not? ” or “Surely all the entries are quite complete”, since my main interests are Romanticism and Victorianism and, indeed, every page I visited seemed quite complete, even those where foreign authors were addressed (I mainly consulted Spanish authors), but what was my surprise when I went into the name of María Josefa Massanés i Dalmau (Spanish Romantic poet) and found a page almost empty in content (the Spanish Wikipedia entry was a bit more complete), so I decided to complete it. I knew it would be a difficult task, since I had to make a Wikipedia entry almost from scratch. Even so, I decided to do it and thus contribute to the information (or little information) about this Spanish author in the English-speaking world.
As a consequence, my first difficulty was to decide how to organize the information. I thought it would be good to add a bit of her bibliography, to give context as to who the author is and how she began her literary career. Already in the bibliography there are names of journals and some early poems. My idea was to add a link to each of them, but not all the poems or journals were available, either because of their age or because the author has been lost over time.
The latter led me to create the “first works” section in which I tried to do the same as in the previous section: put as many links as possible. After this section I created another one that went hand in hand with it, called “Stay in Madrid”, a city in which I gained a lot of fame. In this section, luckily, I found many links and references to attach.
I must admit that it was quite an odyssey to gather this information, summarize it, organize it and reference it, even though I had not yet put the most outstanding works! This was another challenge, because in several sources they discerned which were his most outstanding works, so, after a lot of reading and contrasting information I had to make this list (only with my criteria as a guide). Luckily, I found several of the complete works and was able to add the link, that was really gratifying!
Finally, I thought it was pertinent to add how her last years of life were and to close the informative circle of the author.
So, what were my impressions? In part it was hard work, since there was almost nothing about her on the page and the list of references was summarized in only two. I had a big job ahead of me. It was difficult to organize everything from scratch and to sift through the information in order to put reliable references, although I have to confess that even in Spanish, there was not as much information as I expected to find. On the other hand, I feel fulfilled with the work done because at least there is now a Wikipedia page available in English about María Josefa Massanés. It has been gratifying to feel that I have contributed my grain of sand to academic knowledge.
Link to the wikipedia page to see the final result as a whole:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%ADa_Josefa_Massan%C3%A9s