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Wikipedia is all about the citations. 90% of my Wikipedia edits are either adding citations or [Citation Needed] if I couldn't find a source for an uncited clai
by squeaky-clean 4y ago
Wikipedia is all about the citations. 90% of my Wikipedia edits are either adding citations or [Citation Needed] if I couldn't find a source for an uncited claim.
There are some math and physics articles that can go 10 paragraphs without a single citation. They'd be great blog posts or chapters in a book. But they're poor quality Wikipedia articles.
- MajimasEyepatch 4y agoI've definitely read some Wikipedia pages on niche technical topics in my field that were clearly written by someone with _some_ degree of expertise (maybe a grad student) but with no understanding of the purpose, standards, and style of Wikipedia. The voice is often all over the place.
- nerdponx 4y agoI've seen this too. Sometimes they seem like they are copied and pasted from whatever the person already happened to be writing when they came across the Wikipedia page.
- ilyanep 4y agoA large number of my larger edits are fixing up voice / tone to make an article read more like an encyclopedia and less like an excited blog post.
- prova_modena 4y agoYeah absolutely. I've seen non-wiki-savvy experts do these kind of edits, get reverted, and stop editing wikipedia forever because the whole experience left a sour taste in their mouth. I recently found the essay below targeted to exactly that audience, it's super useful to helping experts who want to contribute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors
- s0rce 4y agoI tried to upload an image that I took (as part of my graduate studies) but was previously published by media outlets and the whole situation really turned me off wikipedia. I think the image is still there though!
- OJFord 4y agoWhat stops me editing more (usually it's a grammatical/formatting error I want to fix, or where I think a link to another page is warranted) is IP blocks. I'm logged in! Why do you care what my IP is! I have a (small) track record but most importantly it's all going against my name and if I'm doing bad things you can just block me! I understand anon IP blocks, of course. But not logged-in ones. Especially when (afaict) all of Mullvad's (London at least) IPs are blocked.
- tomp 4y agoWhy would a math article need citations? A proof is a proof.
- simiones 4y agoOnly for experts capable of following the proof. For everyone else, it's a magical formula. Not to mention, I very very much doubt that those articles prove every property they present (since I've never seen a math text of any kind do that, essentially).
- Someone 4y agoYou’ll always need some axioms to build on. If you allow that, proofs made using proof assistants prove every property they present. And of course, Principia Mathematica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica) is a non-computer example. Both get tedious fast if you try to understand a proof from the axioms up. That’s why you’ll rarely find a publication starting from almost zero.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 4y agoBecause that's essentially original research. If it's a known proof, it should exist in written form somewhere else, which you can cite. if it's novel, it belongs somewhere other than Wikipedia.
- bawolff 4y agoBecause wikipedia is not trying to report the capital-T Truth. Its goal is to summarize human knowledge found by others.
- avgcorrection 4y agoYou could cite all of the notations that you introduce because that tends to be a mess.
- 4y ago
- yamtaddle 4y agoWikipedia's math articles are so bad that I can't even follow the ones about things I already know.
- ghaff 4y agoMath is one of the main categories--although there are other especially adjacent ones--where I often think that 1.) You either already know this stuff or you're going to emerge no more enlightened and probably click elsewhere after the first few sentences, and 2.) Some people really love to play with their equation editors.
- gpm 4y agoWikipedia's math articles can be dense and assume you're an expert, but I've never known them to be wrong.
- kbelder 4y agoThere's other types of bad than wrongness.
- chobytes 4y agoUnfortunately I think 10 page expositions/derivations are the highest quality math and physics pages. I think the wikipedia style is fundamentally incompatible with communicating this kind of information unfortunately.