Every once in a while you find a smallish wiki that looks like it's healthy and has interesting material. These wikis are bigger than the single person brain-dump, and smaller than Wikipedia, and less abandoned than most temporary bouts of enthusiasm that bring people into wiki-land.
Inevitably when I find one of these I have the urge to edit and organize just long enough to figure out what kind of stuff is in it. Sometimes the wiki authors so much assume that everyone knows what some key terms or concepts are, and so those things never get their own pages until you wander in and link them. Other times the wiki authorship collectively is so interesting in making links to things that they never manage to get around to putting pages at the other end of the links. Doing a round of edits to random pages to try to improve them just enough to make sense of them is a way to figure out whether you want to wrap your brain more about the topic.
Wikipedia, in its timeless charmless categorical imperative way, calls the sort of people who wander into a wiki and start tidying things up as WikiGnomes. This is a passive-aggressive way of saying "who the hell are you and why are you editing all of these pages and not adding anything to them". If someone else calls you that, step back and head back to your blog. The other term of art for this is "Wiki gardening", which implies some low-level drone job pulling weeds and fixing other people's punctuation, which also completely misses the point.
Sometimes, in order to make your own sense of something, you have to change it and see if it changes back after you touch it.
(Written on the occasion of wandering into the Code4Lib wiki, making a dozen changes, and stepping back.)
