Is it advisable to use Wikipedia for note-making?

Question

Some people summarize the content of a lecture to deepen their understanding, but I am thinking about using Wikipedia instead. Specifically, I mean finding the Wikipedia article (in my primary, non-English language) that covers the lecture material and adding any suitable content that the article does not already have. In some cases, this may mean making a new article from scratch.

I thought of several reasons that writing and editing a Wikipedia article on what you learned would be beneficial not only to other readers, but to yourself as well:

• It will be more durable to write on Wikipedia than to keep it in a paper notebook. Even more, it could be get even better by someone adding to it, or correcting errors.
• Wikipedia is usually found at the top of a google search, so it's easy to find. You don't have to flip through your notes to find it.
• Wikipedia requires references, but you can use the textbook you used in the lecture as a reference. Of course, I will be careful not to reprint the textbook or lectures as is.

While it has all these advantages, I think the only disadvantage is that it takes a lot of time. Or is there some other reason for not recommending it?

Answer 1

No, this is not a good idea. Wikipedia articles and the kind of notes you'd write while following a lecture are very different types of text.

Audience: A Wikipedia article should be written for a general public, your notes are written for future-you.

Context: A Wikipedia article would start much more with a blank slate for context, your notes fit into the surrounding lecture materials.

Level of detail: Your notes may often be so specific that the corresponding Wikipedia article would get deleted/heavily abridged for lack of notability.

Expert-level of the author: You write notes at the beginning of your journey through new material. The appropriate time to consider writing a Wikipedia article would be once you have actually mastered it.

This is not to say that writing/editing Wikipedia articles cannot be a great way to solidify your topic-mastery in a university course while simultaneously doing some good for the general public. But this cannot replace the role of note-taking.

Answer 2

This is not what Wikipedia is for but you can use a personal Wiki.

There are several ways to do this. You can actually run a personal webserver on your own machine and access it like any Wiki. There are several open source projects that provide source code for such websites.

You can also use applications that are standalone. Lots and lots available out there. I sometimes use Zim for this kind of thing (everyone has different ways of working and it's worth trying out all the options to get what works best for their own needs).

I thought of several reasons that writing and editing a Wikipedia article on what you learned would be beneficial not only to other readers, but to yourself as well.

Wikipedia aims to be an authoritative source of information just like any major encyclopedia. Whether you consider it successful in that regard is neither here nor there. You have to be writing articles that you have a good faith reason to think your material is accurate and precise. Your notes will unlikely to be that. You could even end up banned as the site is moderated and they don't like people abusing the site.

Answer 3

Other have already pointed out many valid reasons why to not abuse Wikipedia for personal note making.

However, one more reason comes to mind: You have no guarantee that someday somebody will alter your notes.

Wikipedia is written by everybody.

Granted, there is a review process, which incidentely might also prevent you yourself from making you notes. Reviewers might question the relevant/quality/ and opt to delete your notes

Answer 4

tl;dr: In theory this could be useful for all concerned. If you have bags of time and patience, including patience with people, you are more likely to succeed, but there's no guarantee.

Is it "advisable"? Well I wouldn't advise it, for several reasons, which I will come to in a moment. But there is benefit if done properly.

• Firstly in ensuring that the content is covered you are improving Wikipedia.
• Secondly in the process you are revising your knowledge from the lectures and getting supporting information from both Wikipedia, and the references you need (which won't be just the course text book) - and other reading you will do to make your edits good.

As to the negative reasons:

• It's important that each article is reasonably balanced, your professor may have an idiosyncratic approach, or be on one side of an academic dispute, or just be plain biased
• You may have to deal with gatekeeping behaviour from Wikipedians. In particular you may need to go through the Articles For Creation process which was designed to make it easier (or at least less traumatic) for new users to create articles, but arguably sometimes has the opposite effect
• You may risk being drawn off into side-tracks that are not relevant to your course
• The articles you edit or create may change (or even be deleted) leaving you without your "notes" (though you can keep copies, or links to specific versions of pages that still exist)
• Wikipedia is not keen on single-source articles, so you would need to spend time on other sources (which is a good idea anyway).
• Special sourcing requirements apply to medical claims, essentially requiring recent high-standard review articles as sources where feasible.

Another comment, somewhat neutral, perhaps: if a section of an article expands out of proportion this is called undue weight - provided the matter is sufficiently well sourced it should be split off into a separate article, leaving a summary behind. There is, however, no guarantee that this will happen.

Good luck, whichever path you take.

Answer 5

I used to do this to some extent, that is, adding new things I learned from books and articles to the relevant wikipedia entries (the Schur polynomial entry is perhaps my main victim). However, I quickly realized that I wanted to add information which is of interest for people in my field, but is perhaps somewhat too specific for wikipedia. Moreover, I wanted to be able to use LaTeX syntax for more general things (tables, etc).

So, I did what StephenG suggested, and made my own web-page about symmetric functions which is publicly available (but not editable by anyone but me). I occasionally get emails from researchers suggesting edits (where I have made some typo), or other inquiries.

Answer 6

Please, no. I spend so much time fixing things that students believe that they heard in lectures on the German Wikipedia. Excellent points have been made above. I suggest installing https://bitnami.com/stack/mediawiki on a machine under your control and keep your notes there.

Answer 7

The lecture material was provided for you and your classmates. You haven't been authorized to share it with the world.

Until you have permission to do so, you should not post your notes on Wikipedia.