User talk:Wikikoff

Hello, Wikikoff, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Our intro page provides helpful information for new users—please check it out! If you need help, visit Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place  on this page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Happy editing! Thore Husfeldt (talk) 08:20, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I notice that your contribution are within algorithms, in particular distributed computing. Great; Wikipedia dearly needs expert editors! Some of the algorithm article are in a sorry state indeed.

It can be difficult to decide what kind of results should or should not be included on a Wikipedia article about a particular subject. Remember that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, so normally it should use secondary sources as a way to decide how to weigh various issues that vie for attention. But this can be impossible for areas that are an subject for active research, such as Graph coloring, which are typically based on primary sources. However, one of the results you added has amassed 0 citations in the scientific literature so far, so it strikes me as premature to include it in Wikipedia already. (Don’t read this as a claim that one should not add results for which one has a conflict of interest—I go so far as to sometimes add results from my own papers, and since I edit Wikipedia under my real name, quite openly. Conflicts of interest are not a problem, as long as they are declared.) If you want to familiarize yourself with Wikipedia’s guidelines read WP:COI and maybe WP:NOR. But it’s thorny issue that benefits from openness and transparency. Thore Husfeldt (talk) 08:20, 24 November 2010 (UTC)