Nowadays Wikipedia is commonly used by scientists at every possible level to make quick and dirty check on the most various facts. It might be the exact form of a mathematical formula, the definition of some quantity or even the birthdate of some famous collegue. For simple facts we can say that Wikipedia entries are rather accurate; anyhow if the validity of the information you are searching is really an important issue you should never trust the net and you better search some good reference. The biggest doubts arises when you start looking on articles regarding your field of expertise: the best you can hope is that they are incomplete but, most of the time, you can easily find blatant mistakes or huge misconceptions.

Nothing to be surprised of: most likely that article wasn’t written by an expert but by a student that has either a second hand knowledge of the subject or didn’t yet manage to grasp it. Since it is your field of expertise you probably know everything about it so you don’t need the Wikipedia article; therefore you are probably not interested at all in making it better. You will just leave it as it is with a slightly worse opinion of Wikipedia quality.

Yet it is possible that, for whetever reason, you decide to make the article better and one thing that might stop you is that you are not confident at all with Wikipedia inner mechanisms. Actually editing Wikipedia is not difficult at all (unless you really want to use sophisticate formatting functions) but I was already asked a few times to explain how to do it.

To make things easier I’ll use a practical example, the page on Anderson localization on the english Wikipedia. This is a short article (little bit more than a quick introduction) and it is not actually a bad one (although, as we will discuss later, it was a lot worse just a short time ago). Moreover it doesn’t use any real formatting function so it will be easier to manipulate.

First thing: anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry. You don’t need to register or anything, you can just clock on the “edit this page” at the top of the page and you will be presented with the edit window. Changing minor spelling mistakes is easy: just scroll the text, find the mistake, correct it and press “Save page”. Done.

Your edit will be stored in the history along with all the others. If you are not registered you will be identified by your IP address, if you are registered you will appear with your nickname of choice. Notice that actually it is a lot easier to be identified via your IP address if you are not registered than it is if you have an account. Pressing the “History” button on the top of the page you will be presented with the full list of all the edit ever made on this page, a link to see how the page appeared just after that edit and an easy way to compare the difference between two given edits. Looking at this you can easily spot that the 7th of November 2008 an unregistered user made a lot of modifications to the page. Comparing how it was before with the present version you can see that, befor the intervention of the anonimous editor the article was rather crappy while now it is short but essentially correct. Incidentally you can also see the IP of the editor and discover that it comes from the CNRS of Grenoble making the editor a lot less anonimous.

The backdraw of the fact that anyone can edit is, of course, that anybody can edit. Sometimes it happens that people insert errors in good faith, sometimes they might do it in bad faith and sometimes they are just vandals who take plasure from disrupting Wikipedia. Around Wikipedia there is a lot of “patrollers” who check that no obvious damage is done but it is unlikely that they are really able to discern a subtle mistake in a subject they know nothing about. It might even happen that, if you are too disruptive in your intervention, they mistake you for a vandal (deleting most of the page without offering any explanation is a good way to incurr in such problems even if you just deleted blatant errors). The best way to avoid this is to be always constructive (substitute false information with correct ones instead of just delete everything) and explain your actions in the Edit summary you can find right below the edit window.

Basic formatting tools are provided as a series of button above the edit window but there is a simple how to available here if you are courious for more sophysticated functions. Formulas are inserted with plain LaTeX so none of you should have problems; just remember that you cannot use packages for all those fancy amsmath effects are mostly off-limits.

When editing always remember that Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a textbook neither a scientific paper. The writing style is just different. Independently from how complicated the subject is the introductory part should be possible to be understood from your grandma. Then you can go in the details but always keeping in mind that you are not giving a lecture.

Another important point is that Wikipedia accept (or should accept) only knowledge that is commonly accepted. The results presented in your latest paper are not suitable for an encyclopedia even if you are very proud of them. Even worse results that are unpublished (you have no idea how many people comes straight to Wikipedia with their brand new “theory of everything”).

Wikipedia administrators are a group of people voted by the community that has the right to cancel someone else edit (you are only allowed to make a new edit over an old one) and to ban people. In most acses bans are for limited amounts of time and only for disruptive people. Nevertheless is not unheard of for people to strongly complain for having been treated unfairly. If this happen to you the best way out is to calmly discuss. The fact that you are the biggest expert on the face of earth on a given subject has no meaning at all on Wikipedia (also because it cannot really be proven) but everyone appreciate external references that proves that you are right.

Finally remember that Wikipedia is made of people and people can be surprisingly stupid from time to time. If you stay there for a while you will find all the usual fauna you can find in every social network or forum.

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