I am CS major and I’m tracking my favorite CS professor publication. I updated Prof. Tom Conmen’s Wikipedia and added his new publication “Unlocked Algorithms”. I needed to add citation about the book and also some brief about the book.
Therefore, I needed to know more about the book and syllabus. It gave me an overview of the concept.
Usually we are interested in things that may not have enough information about them. That’s fine. But if we want to contribute in something we should learn first. But how much? It depends on type of activity. If you want to tach some kids, you are responsible for those kids. But if you want to add something in Wikipedia, you are responsible all people on earth. It means that you can submit something only when you are sure about that. Wikipedia is open to anybody. But, it is not open to everything. Information should be accurate. Wikipedia has a mechanism which enables people to add citations. Most of the time, you need to add different citations.
We should learn enough about the topic before add anything to Wikipedia. It’s even that much harder to edit previous content. Because you should have sufficient reasons to change previous contents.
We should learn something from Wikipedia: Learning enough about everything, avoiding superficiality and making difference between right and wrong contents based on the valid references.
One response to “Updating Wikipedia of a distinguished professor”
Amir, I appreciate your perspective on editing Wikipedia content, and it differs from many other people’s. I can tell that you feel responsible for the content you’re adding and for providing authoritative information to such a wide audience. This is great. The question you raise, then, is how much does one need to learn about a topic before they can contribute to its Wikipedia page? Does it depend on what you’re adding or editing? For example, do you think that someone who has not read much of Thomas Cormen’s work can or should adequately update parts of his page?