Share to Wikimedia#
Value#
In order of value.
Fast Feedback#
Let’s say you post crappy content to Wikipedia. Expect to get feedback from the maintainers of the page; at worst you need to revert what you added and you learned something (even how to edit on Wikipedia).
Language#
The longer you spend in your own notes, the more tied you’ll be to your own wording rather than publicly available shared notes (like Wikipedia). Are you learning new words in your own notes? Are you inventing words there is already another word for out there?
When you read Wikipedia, the theory others have developed often don’t fit into your personal theories. Should you develop personal theories in personal notes when you could be reading and adding to theories others have developed? Don’t give up when you see a theory you don’t understand in “their” shared notes.
Cost#
In order of cost.
Version Control#
When there are issues in a Wikipedia article, it’s not easy to check history to gain confidence that
some content is not as it should be. Because Wikipedia preceded git (and likely many other version
control systems) you can’t get the content in this form. It would be helpful for someone to provide
even a read-only version of Wikipedia as a git repository, or if the repository would be too large,
a way to export the history of a particular article to a git repository.
For workarounds, see:
In a real-world test of WikiBlame, finding the insertion took 22 seconds.
Speed#
It’s slower to type on Wikipedia (in a browser) than to type in plain text.
Form#
Wikipedia is fundamentally oriented around nouns rather than verbs. If you prefer functional programming rather than an everything-is-a-noun language like Java, it’s easier to think in verbs. In fact, a verb-oriented site (like this one) provides a good complement to that approach because you can assume links to verbs are internal to the site, and links to nouns are to Wikipedia.
When you contribute to a “Talk” page, you’re essentially contributing to an “improve define x” article if you see the original article as a “define x” page (thinking in terms of verbs). Thinking in terms of “define x” can make it clear that many of these articles are similar to mathematical axioms. Where’s the bottom, though?