User:Sylvain Ribault/YRIS2019

This is about the Young Researchers Integrability School (YRIS) 2019. Can this school be an opportunity to update or create relevant Wikipedia pages?

Wikipedia for theoretical physicists: a short guide

Why write in Wikipedia

I bet that you use Wikipedia in your work, if only to look up a formula or a definition. But how often do you write in Wikipedia? Probably not often, if we consider the woeful state of the articles on some very important topics in theoretical physics.

You probably concentrate on writing research articles, because this is how your career progresses. But your typical article will be read by a few dozen people at most, whereas the very inadequate Wikipedia page on Conformal field theory typically attracts about 100 viewers per day. If you want many readers, write in Wikipedia: this is arguably at least as useful as reviewing articles for journals (to name another career-neutral activity).

There are good reasons why students and researchers read Wikipedia: this is the ideal tool for orienting oneself in a subfield, understanding the relations between different topics, and finding who did what. Among other things, Wikipedia is a huge collection of relations between concepts, with the associated clickable links: something that is absent from research or review articles.

How to write in Wikipedia

You can easily edit any Wikipedia page, including this page, without even opening an account. However, having an account can help you build a reputation and get credit for your contributions. And it gives you access to useful tools such as a watchlist of articles that you want to follow.

Wikipedia's syntax is simple, and formulas can be written in standard Latex, for example $E=mc^{2}$. You can get used to it by making small corrections to existing articles.

You may worry that someone will mess with your work, and change or delete what you have written. Of course anyone can do that, but in my experience hardly anyone will. We want to write on topics that are, by Wikipedia standards, confidential and highly technical. (Compare the 100 daily pageviews of Conformal field theory to the 2.000 pageviews of Surface tension or the 20.000 pageviews of Albert Einstein.) We are in a quiet corner of Wikipedia where editors are not too many, but too few.

Wikipedia's rules

Wikipedia has ten simple rules, five pillars, and extensive policies and guidelines. These rules are important when trying to write good articles, but in 2d CFT most content will initially have to be written from scratch. In this case, the most important rule is WP:IAR,

If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.

On many of this school's subjects, the priority is to add content where there is none. Improving its quality can come later, and each contributor can specialize according to his/her strengths and tastes, leaving some aspects to other editors. For example, carefully citing good sources is important, but doing it systematically while writing a draft could be disruptive.

When writing in Wikipedia, what matters is not academic credentials, but the quality of the contributions. And writing in Wikipedia differs from writing scholarly articles in some important respects. See Wikipedia:Expert editors.

What would most surely lead to a contribution being deleted is violating copyright. To avoid it, you should avoid copy-pasting from sources: it is better to reformulate. Include images or other media only if this is allowed under a Creative Commons license. For a start, you may look for appropriate media in Wikimedia Commons. There are some exceptions, such as short quotations.

Useful tools

• Citer: a tool for generating wiki-formatted citations for articles or preprints.
• Pandoc: univeral text converter, including conversion from Latex to Mediawiki.

Topics of the school

For each one of the five series of lectures, let us list some existing Wikipedia articles, and some articles that could be created.

Introduction to CFT2

• Two-dimensional conformal field theory
• Virasoro conformal block
• Virasoro algebra
• Multiple gamma function
• Liouville field theory
• Minimal models
• Modular bootstrap
• Rational conformal field theory

Wess-Zumino-Witten models

• Wess-Zumino-Witten model
• Affine Lie algebra
• Kac-Moody algebra
• Current algebra
• Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation
• Sugawara construction

W-algebras

• W-algebra
• Vertex operator algebra
• Quantum Hamiltonian reduction
• Coset conformal field theory (currently redirects to Wess-Zumino-Witten model)

Boundaries and defects

• Boundary conformal field theory
• Topological quantum field theory
• Defect conformal field theory

Deformations

• Conformal perturbation theory
• Regularization (physics)
• Renormalization
• Zamolodchikov metric
• Geometric phase

Other

• List of two-dimensional conformal field theories
• Coulomb gas method

Tutorial

For a general tutorial on editing Wikipedia, see this page. Here I suggest a few exercises for the school's participants.

1. Do an edit in a Wikipedia article of your choice: for example, correct a typographical error, improve the style of a sentence, add a link to another Wikipedia article, or add a reference.
2. Create an account, and login.
3. Add yourself to the list of participants to this tutorial, by posting a short signed message on this page's Talk page.
4. In your sandbox, create a section and a subsection, write an inline formula and a displayed formula.
5. Add one or more articles to your watchlist.
6. Write a few words to introduce yourself on your User page.
7. Name a formula that you use frequently and that is not currently in Wikipedia. Would it fit in an existing article?
8. Which articles would you be the most interested in improving?
9. Which articles should be created?