Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

In grad school back in like 2007 I took a 2-credit class called "The History of Nuclear Enterprise" taught by one of those long white-haired Doc Brown type professors. The final project was for each of us to make Wikipedia pages describing some important topic that wasn't covered yet. I made one on the university's nuclear reactor which had just been shut down. I dug through many linear feet of archived info, scanning photos and collecting various info for the page. It was super rewarding. I was hooked.

Variously since then I have gone deep into some fringe but important-to-some topic and found hard-to-find sources. I've found it effective to collect and present this information in Wikipedia pages.

Like a few months ago I made the page for the Aircraft Reactor Experiment [1], the world's first molten salt-fueled nuclear reactor, built and operated with intent to make nuclear-powered long-range aircraft. I'm pretty proud of the page, and go back to use it somewhat regularly. Having the platform of Wikipedia inspires me to go the slight extra mile in personal research in a way that can be used by everyone.

Thanks Wikipedia, for existing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment

Wikipedia is especially great for elderly as contributors IMHO: lots of experience, knowledge and time. Often they even are bored or lack a "sense of purpose" and community (social connections are the rarer the older we get). Wikipedia adds all that. If Wikipedia would tech-ipo as the likes of WeWork, it would probably be "The Purpose Company". Thank you.

I'm from Germany (2nd biggest Wikipedia) and proud to say 50%+ of my school and university education would not have been possible with excellent articles in BOTH english and german language. Often the english one was great, but the german one better (think WWII topics, german cars, ...) and vice versa (most of the cases hehe). And: it might be a good pointer for learning a language as well, reading about stuff you deeply care about.

It can be quite fun also starting a page and watching it grow. I started the page for covid testing early in the pandemic with a pretty crappy stub and it's now got hundreds of edits from other people and a lot of info.

Thanks also Wikipedia.

And as one of the readers of that page, thank you.

Thanks, acidburnNSA, for existing :)

We need (more) people like you.

I have never been able to find a wikipedia topic I could contribute to. The problem is the topics which don't have pages on wikipedia also don't tend to have a lot of referencable information on the internet.

Books are an acceptable reference, I assume offline magazines or newspapers too.

In fact, they're valuable in that most editors won't use them. (That said, they're also sort of a quirk with respect to verifiability in that, as a practical matter, almost no one is actually check the citation of an obscure book or an old offline magazine.)

How do you handle the notability requirement? Or are your topics too obscure for anyone to care?

I think I'm a bit special in that in my field (nuclear power), many of the smartest people in the world worked hard with vast funding between 1940 and 1960. Later the field got less popular and most people with knowledge of that stuff died. But today lots of investors and technologists are digging back into it to help fight climate change. So there are all these absolute gems in huge technical reports that were declassified in the 1960s and 70s that people are keenly interested in understanding and cataloging.

In my experience, notability probably isn't likely to be a big issue for an obscure topic that is well-referenced. (Although it's always a possibility given some of the Wikipedians out there.)

It's generally more of a problem with people. In part this is because notability is so context-dependent. Every professor at a college or professional football player or senior executive at a large company is notable at some level. Most restaurants have been reviewed once or twice somewhere. But the amount of publicly available information about many of these things is probably fairly limited, especially from third parties.

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