The January issue of the Notices of the AMS is out, and it includes a new article coauthored by me, as well as what look like interesting articles on machine-assisted proof by Terry Tao and on rational approximation by Lloyd Trefethen fils (better known as Nick). My article is about editing mathematics on Wikipedia, with the pretentious or maybe just silly name Princ-wiki-a Mathematica: Wikipedia Editing and Mathematics; it’s by Joel B. Lewis, Russ Woodroofe, XOR’easter, and myself.

You might notice the unusual author name XOR’easter, and the fact that the official Notices version of the article does not actually list XOR’easter as an author. This came about through an unfortunate interaction between the academic publishing system and Wikipedia’s strong support for and encouragement of pseudonymity.

You can read and edit Wikipedia without ever creating a login there, but it is a good idea for continuing editors to create an identity for themselves. For one thing, doing so and becoming established as an editor allows access to editing certain parts of the encyclopedia that have been perennial vandalism targets and locked off to not-logged-in editors. For a second, some editors will view not-logged-in edits with suspicion, leading to unnecessary disputes if you don’t log in. For a third, this actually leads to greater privacy, because your edits will not be tagged directly with your IP address, which is probably more identifying than a pseudonym that you might create.

On the other hand, it is not generally recommended that your Wikipedia identity trace back to your real-world name. Using a traceable identity (as I do) can lead to hassles or worse; I’ve several times had the dismaying experience of dealing with people contacting my employer about my edits. I’m in a position of privilege where that hasn’t harmed me, but even so I’m not convinced that this cost outweighs whatever small reputational benefit I might accrue by using my real name. And much worse is possible; I recently posted about Wikipedians arrested or even killed for their edits. For this reason, Wikipedias policies are very protective of its editors. It is forbidden except under very constrained circumstances to enquire into the identity of other Wikipedia users or to post connections from them to identities elsewhere that they have not made public on their own Wikipedia pages.

Accordingly, my coauthor XOR’easter has not publicly revealed their real-world identity, nor do I know it myself, nor were they willing to release it to the AMS editorial team.

You might think that mathematics publishing would be welcoming of pseudonyms; think of Nicolas Bourbaki, or Blanche Descartes, or M. LeBlanc, or M. Lothaire, or H. Pétard, or D. H. J. Polymath, among many other examples. But perhaps times were different then, perhaps in all of those cases the real identities were known to the editors, or perhaps those names got through by virtue of having a more conventional format. Regardless, in our case the AMS were unwilling to publish a paper by an author whose real-world identity they did not know. The fact that in this case it is the Wikipedia identity, and not the real-world identity, that provides the experience relevant to writing the paper, was not significant to them.

Anyway, I hope this new paper encourages more people to work on Wikipedia’s mathematics content. I think doing so is very valuable: beyond helping to provide a useful resource to the world, I have found Wikipedia editing to help me learn more of the background material I need for my own research and teaching. But maybe this incident can also spark a discussion of what it really means to be pseudonymous in both the internet and academic publishing, and what it should mean.

(Discuss on Mastodon)