Wikipedia:Editing scientific articles
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Be very careful when editing or creating articles of a scientific nature. Check and double check everything you write. Make sure you quote correctly from sources, giving the context consistent with that given in the sources. If you are an expert with a working knowledge of the subject, make sure you are as rigorous when writing for Wikipedia as you are when you write for scientific journals |
When editing or creating an article of any type, editors are expected to abide with Wikipedia's core policies. In case of scientific articles, the most relevant policies are that original research is not allowed and that everything that is written is properly sourced. While sticking to these rules is absolutely necessary, this is not sufficient to guarantee that an article won't contain serious mistakes. In case of articles of a scientific nature, errors or misleading statements can easily slip in, even if the editor is an expert in the subject of the article. Since Wikipedia is often consulted by students and scientists, such errors can have a negative impact on society, as well as be highly damaging to Wikipedia's reputation as a reliable source.
To prevent errors, the following guidelines are recommended.
- Check every nontrivial statement you intent to edit in an article. Try to determine if it is possible that a statement could be invalid under any possible circumstances. To find out, you may need to do study carefully the entire source in which the statement is made or look in other sources. The necessary conditions that are assumed for the validity of a statement made on page 400 of a technical book, may well be mentioned many pages earlier. If you find that the statement is not valid in general, you need to write down the necessary conditions under which the statement is explicitly true.
- If you make edits to an existing article and you find that a statement you want to edit in, which you have checked as described in the previous point, is in conflict with other statements made in the same article, then you need to get to the bottom of this conflict. Even if you have a very good source for your statement while the conflicting statement in the wiki article is not sourced, that by itself does not imply that there exists a real conflict. It may be that the conflicting statement is true under some conditions that are not written down explicitly in the article. The conflicting statement may then be true as well, but it simply has a different meaning. You need to convince yourself that the conflicting statement is really wrong under any interpretation consistent with the way the Wikipedia article is written, before you can conclude that it is wrong. In case of doubts, you need to discuss this on the talk page of the article and/or contact members of a relevant WikiProject.
- If you find yourself in a dispute with other editors about a technical point, then discuss this as much as is possible from first principles using the underlying theory. Do not simply throw around direct quotes from textbooks or scientific articles, as then the proper context may be missing. Often the proper context is the source of the dispute. These sorts of discussions are in no way a violation of the ban on original research.