[alboaie]

After an editor, who has edited millions of pages and seems to be a jack-of-all-trades, unjustifiably rejects your contribution on a topic where you have dozens of scientific articles published, the only conclusion is that the system is flawed. There's a need for a fundamental change in approach, probably to a system where censorship exists only in cases of clearly illegal content, and various opinions are allowed to be expressed. On the other hand, to filter out the noise, there's a need for a trust propagation system among editors and viewers, so that each time, you get the most probable form of a page based on the trust given to direct contacts and indirectly to recursive contacts. Maybe AI could also help a bit. Who dare to start a new Wikipedia ;) ?

[tptacek]

From bitter experience: if you have well established subject matter expertise on a topic, you should almost certainly not be writing Wikipedia articles about it. In Wikipedia's framing, you are a generator of primary and secondary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source: it is exclusively a roadmap to other, more authoritative sources. Instead of writing Wikipedia articles, write the articles Wikipedia will end up drawing from.

It's quite painful to directly edit Wikipedia articles on your own areas of expertise. You have context lay readers don't have, and you'll often leave things implicit or skip steps, because you know that laying those steps out and citing every detail of them isn't helpful for learning & understanding. But the encyclopedia doesn't work that way: the community there can't tell the difference between sensible elisions done in the spirit of efficient explanation, and original research that simply takes an opinion you hold idiosyncratically or fractiously and mints an encyclopedia article out of them.

It's also going to be deeply suspicious, for very good reasons that don't apply to you but do apply to like 70% of all other cases, any time you write something and cite yourself.

It is also just the case that not everyone should commit themselves to writing whole Wikipedia articles. I found the process pretty unhealthy; it sucked me in, to be sure, but it also filled my time with rules lawyering and squabbles. It'd be easy to criticize Wikipedia for having that culture, except that the project is so spectacularly successful.

[dxbydt]

There was a sketching algo on wikipedia that was not well described. So I added 2 lines of python to illuminate what was intended by the roundabout description. Within an hour my edit was reverted with the terse comment - "Wikipedia is not a github." ! So I clicked on the editor to find who this rude person was. It was the professor who had invented that sketching algo.

[janalsncm]

I always always always prefer code to mathematical notation or descriptions. Maybe it’s because I was never formally taught notation whereas I use code everyday, but I often find that mathematical notation lacks sufficient context and explanation.

Ultimately I’m going to need to turn your algorithm into code anyways so let’s just cut out the middleman. That may not be a popular opinion with peer reviewers, though.

[nerdponx]

That's ridiculous on so many levels, but most of all because there are plenty of other computer science articles with code samples.

[tptacek]

This is a great story. Do you remember the name of the page? It'd be funny to track it down in the page history.

[hollerith]

>It'd be easy to criticize Wikipedia for having that culture, except that the project is so spectacularly successful.

My recollection is that it started being spectacularly successful within a year or 2 of its founding (in 2001) but that the profusion of rules (and deletionism) started to ramp up slowly (over a period of many years) after it started being spectacularly successful.

(The Wikimedia Foundation was incorporated on June 20, 2003. The Foundation was granted section 501(c)(3) status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Code as a public charity in 2005.)

[edanm]

> It'd be easy to criticize Wikipedia for having that culture, except that the project is so spectacularly successful.

Much as I dislike some aspects of Wikipedia, I think this sentence should be printed in bold at the top of every discussion talking about how to change that culture.

Also true of a lot of other "why don't they just X" statements about other successful projects. Chesterton's fence in action.

[xor25519]

You can be pseudonomous on Wikipedia. Also, some experts are so deep in their field of expertise that they assume others to be knowing something they take for granted. (I am not a Wikipedia editor.)

[tptacek]

It doesn't have much to do with your public identity, but rather with how experts in a field tend to write about that field; they make assumptions that are universally accepted among practitioners, but aren't obvious to lay readers, and Wikipedia tends to challenge those assumptions.

I guess hiding your identity is a way to cite your own stuff there.

[pndy]

> the only conclusion is that the system is flawed. There's a need for a fundamental change in approach

There are attempts of creating more "professional" electronic encyclopedia like Citizendium [1] and Scholarpedia [2] but it seems that such tasks are rather hard since Wikipedia solidified its position already, despite flaws

[1] - https://en.citizendium.org/

[2] - http://www.scholarpedia.org/

[anonymouskimmer]

Wikipedia policy specifically says to not reference primary sources (e.g. published, peer-reviewed journal articles). Only secondary sources such as news articles referencing the papers. This is probably why your contributions are being rejected.

I haven't read the specific justification for this policy, but a couple of reasons is that it allows two rounds of review of the information prior to incorporation into Wikipedia, and that journal articles are typically more technical and thus more difficult for general Wikipedia editors to understand when checking whether the sources back up the claims in the Wikipedia article.

[swalling]

This is not correct at all.

The sourcing policy says: “If available, academic and peer-reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources on topics such as history, medicine, and science.”

[anonymouskimmer]

When did they change that policy?

[swalling]

Peer-reviewed research papers have always been allowed in citations. The nuance that evolved over time is this "For example, a paper reviewing existing research, a review article, monograph, or textbook is often better than a primary research paper." Meaning, you can cite a research paper, but something more secondary that summarizes a body of scholarship would be better.

Individual research papers that haven't been reproduced often present conflicting results with one another, especially in fields with poor quality research like nutrition. Experts often run into this issue when they try to cite their own research or a narrow set of papers in a given field, especially when recent research conflicts with prior scientific consensus. It's why tptacek's comment above is apropos.

[mrguyorama]

They never did. You can't use YOUR OWN work as a source, but you can use primary sources.

[jimmaswell]

> You can't use YOUR OWN work

Bad rule, I'd just use an alt or not my own name.

[ckoerner]

Which is also against the rules and undermines the systems in place to make the encyclopedia more reliable.

[asdff]

Censorship and biasmaking will always exist because the benefits it has for the elite are too high to not try and engage in it. There are many articles on current events in wikipedia where you can sift through the webarchive and see very different articles in terms of what details are highlighted or omitted entirely.

[tim333]

It depends a bit on the reason for the rejection. Wikipedia have various rules such as using secondary rather than primary sources that trip up people who are experts on some topic but unclear on how Wikipedia works.

[alexey-salmin]

> Who dare to start a new Wikipedia ;)

That literally happened hundreds of times and every single one of them is dead.

Whatever is it what Wikipedia is doing, it seems to be working far better then alternatives.