User talk:Potaman

Your undo on Wikipedia page "Backtracking line search"

Hi, I see that you undid my edit on Wikipedia and accuse me of trying to plug in my work.

It is true that I cited my work, but the reason was that the results I mentioned have been really new and my paper was the first to discuss those results. Hence, naturally, I must cite the paper. (Except if you can show by undeniable evidences to the opposite, then in that case I will revise the page correspondingly.) Besides my paper, I also added two other papers. The purpose I wrote was not to promote myself, but to help people with knowing that Backtracking GD is a good method to use, and the page (before my edit) was very bare. (Now, if you search on the internet, this is not at all obvious, with many people claiming that Backtracking GD cannot be implemented in large scale. Or if you look at the Wikipedia page on Wolfe's method, it seems to create the impression that Wolfe's method is better than Armijo's method, while with current knowledge we can see the opposite.) Also, to put things in historical perspective (my paper has an overview section for this). I think the purpose of Wikipedia is to spread knowledge, and hence I can edit it if I reflect correctly the history and bring more knowledge to readers.

Now, don't just always because an author citing their paper to accuse them of selfpromoting. Please research on the subject before you make such a move. Also, I think author citing themselves is a normal practice, and it is only unethical if for example they try to ignore (when they certainly know) that other people did the work before them. If an author does not cite their papers in a Wikipedia, but cite that of their friends/advisors and so on, would they be unethical or not? One can also ask whether a deletion of a Wikipedia page is unethical or not, if the reason given is ambiguous.