Help talk:Wikipedia editing for researchers, scholars, and academics

Why?

Give and take. As a research scientist you are benefiting from a vast collection of survey articles written by the Wikipedia community. Why not reciprocate and help improve the existing articles by sharing your knowledge?

This has been the primary motivation for me in starting to contribute. Nageh (talk) 18:18, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Added, thanks. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:22, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

General considerations

"Ideally, every paragraph of a Wikipedia article (outside of the initial summary paragraph) should have at least one footnote or other source, and in many cases every sentence will have its own source." --- Yes, these are WP guidelines, but probably, many mathematicians would mitigate this formulation, and moreover, as far as I remember, it is mitigated in (some) WP guidelines. Boris Tsirelson (talk) 19:25, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

You're probably thinking of Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines. I'll add a link to that. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:05, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

How

"(just use underscores instead of spaces) so another way to find an article you want to edit or create is..." --- Yes, but I wonder, in which case (if any) is it better than just do the WP search? Boris Tsirelson (talk) 19:28, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I simplified that paragraph and discussed WP search in it (I rarely use WP search myself but I guess others' practice may differ). Thanks for the suggestion. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:12, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Some remarks

Good idea. Some remarks:

• I'd might be a good idea to stress the different role of referencing on wikipedia as compared to scientific literature. (i.e. in scientific literature the primary reason is to give provide attribution for an idea, on wikipedia references serve to provide as verification of a fact or claim.) This affects both what statement you choose to reference and what reference you choose to use.
• Related to above, you might want to mention that there is basically no such thing as common knowledge on wikipedia. Normally, in scientific writing you would not provide references for basic facts that can be considered basic knowledge. On wikipedia, these things typically DO require some sort of reference.
• Some of the remarks you make are very mathematics specific. For example, you write "...you would probably feel free to make up and prove little lemmas that lead towards the main results...", proving little lemma's is a typical stylistic element of mathematical writing. I'd might be helpful to no mathematician researchers to have slightly more generic examples.

Just some random thoughts, do what you want with them.TR 21:25, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I split off the section on sourcing and expanded the part in their about what sources are used for along the lines you say. I think Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines does provide some leeway for common knowledge, though. And I reworded the "little lemma" part to make it less math-specific. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:12, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

why wikipedia?

why wikipedia and not open research? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dynsys (talk • contribs) 21:37, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

To me that seems a false dichotomy. Research is research, and publishing it openly is a good thing, but by its nature it is often only readable by specialists. And if it truly is research, it is not appropriate for Wikipedia (see WP:OR) until it has become established in the scientific literature. But there is still a place in the world for writing that moves topics from research to a broader audience that includes beginning researchers, researchers in other specialties, students, and interested amateurs; that's something the scientific side of Wikipedia can be good for. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:24, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Size and specificity

Copied from User talk:David Eppstein

I agree that it's an offputting beginning. Would you find the old edit acceptable if the "Getting started" section came before the "Content discussions" section (modified from "General considerations")? HLHJ (talk) 05:40, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

My general feeling is that all of this is in the category of "general advice for newbies" having little to do with the specific topic of the essay and little feel for which pieces of advice will actually be useful and which are likely to come across as hostile condescension. (Don't underestimate how offputting such impressions can be: most academics have little free time and little patience for wasting of it. I have certainly myself backed away from volunteering on projects where I thought I could do some good and I thought the project would be interesting but I also thought the people running the projects were condescending to me.) I think it would be better to link to general-advice-for-newbie type essays rather than copying there content within that essay; that way, at least, academics reading it will see that it's just general advice for newbies rather than taking it as indicative of how Wikipedia editors think of academics specifically. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:21, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

I think you're right, there's too much general material, and too much total material. I see the following problems with the current version:

• it ignores the presence of Visual Editor in the UI
• it starts in an offputting way, running from how to create a username straight into "You need to leave your ego and credentials by the door".
• it runs "You'll face these things that you will find offputting, and you'll have to deal with them", rather than "You'll face these things for these reasons". There's research showing that people handle rejection better if they see it as having systemic rather than personal causes, so when Wikipedia is offputtingly different from academia for a reason (no original research, lots of vandals), it'd be good to give it.
• any introduction to academia includes social support, mostly in the form of a supervisor. The article doesn't mention social support at all.

I'll try to include these things in a series of incremental edits which shorten or at least do not lengthen the article, while reducing general advice to links. Please ping me here if you can think of other improvements. HLHJ (talk) 15:40, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Finished for now. I've removed 325 characters net, but added a lot of external links, headings, and whitespace, so it is more succint than that would suggest. HLHJ (talk) 18:04, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Topics now missing are: advice about article creation, advice about puppetry. HLHJ (talk) 18:14, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Might this list of discipline-specific Wikiprojects be useful?HLHJ (talk) 18:32, 23 August 2017 (UTC)