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2something@2something@transfem.social (2026-09-18 08:34:37)
Wikipedia's coverage of math is about to get a lot worse.

For a long time, many mathematicians have noted that Wikipedia is unusually accurate in its coverage of math, breaking the pattern that everyone thinks Wikipedia is less accurate in their area of expertise.  

Why?  No one knows for sure, but there are various guesses floating around.  One of my friends said she thinks it's because "mathematicians are very careful," so errors get corrected.

I think the real reason is that mainstream news media doesn't talk about math very often.

Wikipedia gives the highest level of reverence to "reliable secondary sources."  Whatever the majority of "reliable secondary sources" say, Wikipedia assumes is the truth.  Information in primary sources is not considered notable enough to be in Wikipedia.  

Hence, no matter how many autistic experts try to improve a Wikipedia article, it can never be more accurate than the reliable secondary sources.

I believe there are two fundamental problems with Wikipedia's coverage of math and science.  First, they consider research papers to be primary sources.  I claim that the true primary sources for math are the axioms and definitions.  Everything we write about them is a secondary source.

Secondly, Wikipedia considers newspapers and their online counterparts to be "reliable."  Newspapers are not reliable.  The people who write for newspapers are not experts in the subjects they write about.  The editors are not experts in the subject they are editing.  No one with any level of authority at a newspaper publisher has factual accuracy as their primary goal.

A scientist who finds a factual inaccuracy on Wikipedia might try to fix it, but their fix will quickly be reverted, because the error is present in a bunch of newspapers, and Wikipedia says newspapers are "reliable."

By contrast, mathematicians have been fairly luck because until recently, the newspapers had little interest in talking about math.  Wikipedia editors were forced to