User:Opabinia regalis/Advice for Experts

What expert editors shouldn't write about
So you're a newly registered expert editor. Newbies usually write about what they know. You're probably thinking you should write about the very specific subsubsubtopic you're an expert in, right? The topic of your latest paper, or maybe the subject of your PhD? No, don't do it! Why not?


 * It's really hard. Writing at a level and for an audience appropriate for a general reference work is really difficult when the topic is something you know intimately. There are all kinds of tiny details that seem very important from the inside, and reaching what feels to you like adequate coverage of a body of literature you're deeply familiar with is a daunting task. An encyclopedia article is not an academic publication, and is subtly but significantly different from a review paper or a textbook; it can be extremely hard to break these well-established writing habits when working with very familiar material.
 * Wikipedia has its own house style and it's weird. Wikipedia formatting and style preferences exist in part to standardize across a wide variety of topics, and in part to make difficult articles accessible to non-experts. This produces house-style features that are at odds with what you'd expect in academic literature and that often look amateurish. Again, this is much more jarring with very familiar material than it might otherwise be.
 * You'll be too emotionally invested. You just wrote an article about a major part of your life's work. Randy from Boise stopped by and "copyedited" and made a hash of it, or added some wikilinks to the wrong targets, or covered your article in cleanup tags. Now you're pissed off: you donated your time and some random jackass pissed all over your work. But a Wikipedia article isn't "yours" anymore once you've clicked "submit", and you don't get to choose your collaborators here. If you try to object to this kind of behavior, you will get surprisingly little sympathy.
 * Your biases will show. Every subfield has its ongoing disputes and unresolved questions, and most active researchers will have positions on those issues. It can be challenging to write - and cite - in a way that doesn't reflect your positions, even if you think you're being very careful. Wikipedians can be quite good at picking up on these issues even in topic areas they don't know well.
 * Someone will complain about COI. Wikipedians have strange ideas about what constitutes a conflict of interest. Some people here define COI very, very broadly, and are very aggressive about rooting it out. You might think that having an expert here offering to write about their own work would be a good thing, but the reality is that we do get people spamming their work, naively giving it undue prominence in distantly related articles, or advancing their own side of an academic disagreement. If you cite yourself extensively, people are likely to notice and complain. The people who do the complaining are mostly not experts and mostly will not be able to objectively evaluate the self-citations, but they will complain anyway.
 * You might out yourself. If you wish to remain pseudonymous, but you write about a topic 50 people in the world take an interest in, your interests, writing style, and citation patterns might make it clear who you are.
 * You won't get the thanks, recognition, or deference you might expect. Even if you do make your identity public, on Wikipedia your CV is your contributions history. Expecting others to recognize and defer to your real-life expertise is a recipe for disappointment and frustration.

What expert editors should write about
OK, what should you write about then? How else can you use your expertise effectively?


 * Write about the topics you want to read about but never get around to. If you have deep knowledge of one tiny subfield, you also know a lot about closely related fields where you're less invested in and less familiar with the existing body of literature. Because of your strong background knowledge and research skills, you can quickly learn enough about topics in these related fields to write an encyclopedia-level article about them, and in the process you get to learn about some interesting work that you wouldn't otherwise have invested the time to read. If your professional interactions are almost all with people who have or are developing similar backgrounds, it's easy to forget how important this kind of skill really is. On Wikipedia it's impossible to overlook.
 * Write about people in your field. Not your friends! Not your advisor! But Wikipedia's coverage of academics and researchers is very patchy and very subject to the problems of systemic bias. People who can write good academic biographies with clear and engaging summaries of a person's research activities are much needed.
 * Update and improve references in existing articles. If you're affiliated with an academic institution, you probably have very good journal access. Sometimes Wikipedia articles get written by people who don't have a broad range of journals available to them, or who are not familiar with citation patterns, impact factors, or other signals of the quality of a journal or paper. You can make sure that existing articles are well-cited and that their sources reflect current literature in the field.
 * Review others' articles. The Wikipedia content-review processes are always in need of more reviewers. This is especially true for technical articles in STEM fields, where reviewers familiar with the subject are hard to find.
 * Connect with the WikiProject for your field of interest. Many fields have a local community of Wikipedia editors. WikiProjects are often the best way to integrate into that community and find collaborators interested in working on similar topics. Despite the appearance of "crowdsourcing", many Wikipedia articles are primarily written by single authors working alone. It's often much more fun to work with a small group of people with similar levels of expertise on an article that covers a broad topic area.