When is it appropriate to add references to own papers on Wikipedia?

Question

The Wikipedia rules about citing yourself state:

Using material you have written or published is allowed within reason, but only if it is relevant, conforms to the content policies, ... and is not excessive.

While the Wikipedia rules allows self citation, is it ethical to self cite?

Short example: there are two good papers on the same topic, A and B. Is it ethical for the authors of paper A to include a reference to A and not B in the "References" section at the end of the article even if it is not cited in the article. On Wikipedia, it is pretty common for things to be just listed at the end and not mentioned in the article itself.

My questions are:

• At what point is it appropriate to edit references to my own papers/preprints into Wikipedia? (Maybe even add a paragraph claiming the same breakthrough I claim in my own paper.)

• What should one do when noticing that otherwise unknown and very new preprints pop up as (uncited) references in Wikipedia articles?

Answer 1

I think this question really has two parts, the ethical question and the practical question.

First of, the ethical question. Let me say that I am surprised that you see the issue whether it is ethical to self-plug your work on Wikipedia as an entirely different issue than whether this is allowed by Wikipedia policy. Wikipedia is a private web site run on private donations, and is entitled to define how they want to do things around their piece of the web (much like we do here at Stack Exchange, to the chagrin of plenty a new user). I think it is impossible to argue that it is ethical (for academics or anybody else) to (mis-)use their service in a way that violates their own rules for your personal gain. Hence, to answer your updated question:

It's a question about what is considered ethical in academia

This is not, precisely due to the reason that you say you are not interested in: it is not allowed by Wikipedia. It cannot be ethical to use their service, but don't consider their rules.

Second, your question also has a bit of a practical part. You claim that it should be really easy to self-plug your work on Wikipedia, and that it will be hard to trace and prevent. (You also seem to imply that this impact on the ethical question, which I think it has not - whether something can be done is pretty much irrelevant to whether it is ethical to do it)

I have a bit of a case study for this. A large European research project I was involved with some time ago once got asked by its reviewers to add their own papers and other outcomes to relevant articles "to increase visibility". After some internal discussion, the project obliged and started with some really defendable and arguably independently useful edits (taking very stubby articles and improving them with peer-reviewed content from our own papers, and adding references). All of those changes were rolled back within minutes, with the explanation that the edits looked too much like self-advertisement. We tried again, even more conservatively, and the same thing happened again. It turned out that the self-policing in Wikipedia works much better than anybody in the project anticipated. We gave up on the issue quickly.

The morale here is just that Wikipedia is aware that people could try to do this (and I am sure many do), and are very vigilant. I am sure you are able to edit in your links given enough energy, but it may be much harder than you imply it is.

Answer 2

Never.

Let someone else do it.

Answer 3

The three columns of wikipedia are Verifiability, No Original Research, and Neutral Point of View. In my opinion (and this is established in a large part of the wikipedia community, imho), you should avoid adding your own citations, since it is hard to have a neutral point of view wether your citation is really that important.

What you can do instead (and what I have seen), is that you suggest adding your citation (or some paragraph about your work) at the talk page of the article. Have patience and see how other react to your suggestion.

If on the other hand you see questionable sources, you might remove it. But again if you feel unsure if this is appropriate use the talk page of the article.

Answer 4

If you think that an article of yours would be a useful reference, you can mention it on the Talk page for the relevant article or an associated Wikiproject, and suggest to other editors that they consider adding it to the main article.

Answer 5

1. it should be peer-reviewed, otherwise wikipedia would be working nearly as a primary source (anyone could write something on a blog and use it as a reference, laughable).
2. once it's peer-reviewed, the references should be reasonable, they should support what is written in wikipedia and what is written should have a general interest in the article itself. Maybe many people would see my paper on topology if I put it in the Pope's article, but that's basically vandalism.
3. every paper has a set of references and describes the state of the art in some area, some of those references may be self-references. That is mostly the type of content that should be provided in wikipedia.

it has never occurred to me that there's a high potential of the same kind of abuse by academics.

If well used, this should be helpful for both academics and wikipedia.

Answer 6

You should cite your own work if it truly adds to the quality of the Wikipedia article. It's true that it's in one's self-interest to get the publicity you described from having one's work cited on Wikipedia, but it can also be constructive. After all, who is going to know the subject better than the person who wrote a peer-reviewed journal article on it?

If it really is shameless and unethical self-promotion, people will see it and know, and so will the Wikipedia admins, who will revert it with prejudice.

Even though Wikipedia has rules against original research, once research is peer-reviewed and accepted by the scientific community, it doesn't really matter who adds it to Wikipedia. An example of a scholar writing about his own work can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wheel_theory

Answer 7

A few thoughts:
* having expertise in the subject of a Wikipedia article is (or at least should) be welcome;
* that expertise may well be exercised through detailed reviews of the article on its talk page;
* references not cited in the article text have a lower probability to stay for long;
* references supporting statements made in the article are most needed;
* if one of your papers qualifies for supporting such a statement, suggest the edit on the talk page first, and if nobody objects within a week or so, feel free to do it;
* apart from supporting statements in the Wikipedia article, images or other media from your research article might be useful as an illustration in one or several Wikipedia articles (including in other languages); this only works with openly licensed stuff (see overview of such uses; link loads slowly);
* there are ways to write an entire paper such that it can be published as a Wikipedia article (details);
* there are ways to follow added or removed citations systematically (example: DOIs)