User:Sylvain Ribault/WP biblio essay

Researchers: be lazy, write in Wikipedia

Imagine that your research requires you to learn some basic or not-so-basic topic, possibly outside your own subject of expertise. You need a working knowledge of the topic, and this knowledge will later be a prerequisite for anyone who wishes to understand your own research results. For example, you may be a physicist in need of a mathematical theorem, or a biologist using a chemical reagent.

Nowadays, your search for relevant information and references may well start on Wikipedia.


 * In most cases, you are likely to find some useful information.


 * If you are lucky, you may find relevant technical results and references.


 * In an ideal world, you would find a complete and up-to-date survey.

Now, Wikipedia does not write itself: someone has to do it. You may hope that specialists write articles in their own fields, but they have little incentive to do it, and in practice they do not do it too often. On the other hand, when learning a new topic, you are in a good position to improve the relevant Wikipedia articles. This could be advantageous, and here is why:


 * 1) Wikipedia is just a different medium for work that you are doing anyway, replacing the private notes that you would normally write.
 * 2) Wikipedia is easily accessible from anywhere, at any time. If you write a private note, are you sure you can find it again in a few years?
 * 3) Various types of contributions are possible: adding references, correcting outdated statements, stating results, or just stating that they exist. (“The case X has been treated in reference Y.”)
 * 4) Specialists of the topic may or may not get involved. If you contact them, they may make comments and suggestions.
 * 5) When your own research is done and you write up your results as a research article or preprint, material that is in Wikipedia can reasonably be considered as common knowledge, and needs not be reviewed: referring readers to Wikipedia is enough. This is particularly efficient if the same topic ends up being relevant to several articles of yours.
 * 6) Wikipedia helps the community adopt standard and accurate terminology, reducing the chance of needless duplication of work.

These considerations arise from my own experience over the years. My contributions to Wikipedia were initially focused on my own field of research, namely two-dimensional conformal field theory. However, I have gradually shifted to contributing more about mathematical topics that were needed for my research, even creating a couple of mathematical articles. This shift was not planned or deliberate. It meant adopting a more practical and selfish view of Wikipedia: a useful tool rather than a mission.

If this modus operandi could be generalized, it might alleviate one of the main reasons why scientific Wikipedia articles are so often poor or outdated: the lack of incentives for academics to contribute. In the existing journal-based system, it is not easy to reward academics for writing in Wikipedia, not least because of the difficulty of attributing authorship. I am now proposing that in many cases no reward is needed, because writing in Wikipedia pays for itself by being part of a more efficient workflow.

If you are convinced, and want to get started, you may have a look at this short tutorial.