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Why don't more mathematicians improve Wikipedia articles?

Wikipedia is a widely used resource for mathematics. For example, there are hundreds of mathematics articles that average over 1000 page views per day. Here is a list of the 500 most popular math articles. The number of regular Wikipedia readers is increasing, while the number of editors is decreasing (graphs), which is causing growing concern within the Wikipedia community.

WikiProject Mathematics is relatively active (compared to other WikiProjects, but not compared to MathOverflow!), and there is always the need for more experts who really understand the material. An editor continually faces the tension between (1) providing a lot of advanced material and (2) explaining things well, which generates many productive discussions about how mathematics articles should be written, and which topics should have their own article.

Regardless of the long term concerns raised about whether Wikipedia is capable of being a resource for advanced mathematics (see this closed question), the fact is, people are attempting to learn from Wikipedia's mathematics articles right now. So improvements made to articles today will benefit the readers of tomorrow.


Wikipedia is a very satisfying venue for summarizing topics you know well, and explaining things to other people, due to its large readership. Based on the number of mathematicians at MathOverflow, who are willing to spend time (for free!) answering questions and clarifying subjects for other people, it seems like there is a lot of untapped volunteer potential here. So in the interests of exposing the possible obstacles to joining Wikipedia, I would like to know:

Why don't mathematicians spend more time improving Wikipedia articles?

Recent efforts intended to attract new participants and keep existing ones include the friendly atmosphere of the Teahouse, as well as WikiProject Editor Retention.

In case anyone is interested, my Wikipedia username is User:Mark L MacDonald (which is my real name).

Mark M
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