[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.