FAQ.page (2149B)
1 # Why not do it on Wikipedia? 2 3 The main reason is that Wikipedia does not accept [original research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research) and requires sufficient [notability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability) for articles, so we can't expect Wikipedia to welcome highly specialized articles on recent concepts and results. So the advantage to having our own wiki is that we don't need to worry about deletionism: recent research, etc., is more than welcome. 4 5 Another advantage is that many articles on Wikipedia are hard to read because they contain many different perspectives about a topic, e.g., [the article on first-order logic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic), [the article about the chase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_(algorithm)). Having our own wiki means that the articles contain our community's perspective about a topic while avoiding territoriality fights on Wikipedia. 6 7 Of course, it's fine to point to Wikipedia for concepts that are suitably defined there, and it's great to contribute to Wikipedia the content that is welcome there. 8 9 # Why not survey papers or books? 10 11 Writing a survey paper or a book gives a snapshot of a field at a specific point in time, but: 12 13 - There is no "master index" of all relevant surveys and books. 14 - Papers and books cannot be updated, so they may not reflect newer developments. 15 - Even when they are not paywalled, papers and books are provided as large PDF files, which are intimidating and difficult to navigate, whereas Web pages are more convenient. 16 - Collaboration on papers and books is less convenient than collaboration on a wiki. 17 18 # Is it OK to promote your own work? 19 20 Yes, it is fine. Provided you do not do give it undue visibility (e.g., advertising it on the [index page](Index)...), it's fine to add definitions and results from your latest paper. Please try to integrate them nicely to the existing material, and write down prerequisites if they are missing. It's probably useless to integrate technical definitions and proofs to the wiki -- instead, you can put precise pointers to the relevant part of the paper.