User talk:ProfKnots

Hello, ProfKnots, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

I noticed that one of the first articles you edited appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article. Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, visit the Teahouse, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{Help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 11:26, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

Hello,

I have done my best to follow the guidelines in my recent article. There are no references to my own work and I have avoided any hype (there is one sourced sentence about why people are interested). Please let me know if there are any other issues with Olympic gel that risk running against the policies. ProfKnots (talk) 14:24, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

So glad you're here. WELCOME. Truly. Can't speak math to save my life but wanted to make sure you knew that we Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics and that you knew this existed (maybe it brought you here?):

Eppstein, David; Lewis, Joel Brewster; Woodroofe, Russ (January 2025). "Wikipedia Editing and Mathematics" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 72 (1): 1. arXiv:2412.20419. doi:10.1090/noti3096. ISSN 0002-9920.

Anyway don't be shy about hitting up my talk page if you need anything and keep up what appears to be great work!

Best, jengod (talk) 02:31, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Hi,

Thanks for the message. That project page looks useful.

Perhaps you can provide some advice. A while back I tried to make an edit to page and it was reverted by David Eppstein, who as far as I can tell runs the show around here. He stated that my edits were "waffle" (whatever that means) and accused me of spamming citations to my own articles (I did not, the reference I cited was written by several people who aren't me although I don't know how I'd prove that). I would, at some point, like to keep adding information that readers would find interesting or useful, but what is a productive way to have a dialog without getting shut down by users who outrank me in the unofficial hierarchy? ProfKnots (talk) 17:13, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Ah you have discovered the very exhausting "people" side of wikipedia! We are basically a social media site but we have a baseline mandatory level of literacy and the passcodes are DOI and ISBNs. Anyway, you will be reverted now and then. You will nominated for deletion every so often and your feelings will be hurt because what the hell man! It's just the ecosystem around here has an overactive immune response to new users bc there are sooooooo many people who want to leverage the site for their own benefit. Anyway, primary advice:

• keep doing your thing
• be bold, you don't really need to ask for permission to do stuff officially BUT
• aggressively overexplain yourself, especially in edit summaries and on talk pages until your patience runs out. Don't get me wrong, I very often edit summary with the word "words" and I've seen edit summaries that just say "math" but on existing pages especially edit summaries keep everyone calm
• I don't know anything about your specialty field or your role therein but just as a framing device graf 2 of sxn 8 from the above-linked paper may be helpful?

Rather than advertising their own super-specialization, experts can make themselves useful by explaining the prerequisites to understanding it. What articles would a student read in order to understand the background and broader context of your research? Wikipedia articles are all works-in-progress, and we can guarantee that somefraction of those articles need attention. You won’t be automatically respected as an expert, but part of expertise is knowing the right references to go to and how to summarize them. This will be greatly appreciated, and will also help protect important content, since unsourced material may be deleted or cut far back, even if correct.

My feeling is you kind of have to write *around* your research but that doesn't preclude you from teaching everything you learned to get to the edge of knowledge, you know? Like just as a possibly useless example, Jerry Seinfeld is a world expert on 20th- and 21st-century comedy. He could do a lot of good for our comedian content by adding quotes with timestamps from his own show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee but that would be frowned upon. In lieu of that, though, he *could also* go on a run of writing articles for all the comedy albums of the 1960s and 1970s that were formative for him. He might have a whole collection of old-school comedian memoirs that he could just pull off his office bookshelves for expansion and citations. That would be a bonanza for our "sum of all human knowledge" goal.

Anyway, people here are mostly nice, just jumpy. It's also very much a do-ocracy, fueled by people who act like it's a full-time paid job even though it is very not. People passing through casually often get knocked aside too readily. Also, and I don't love this myself, there's the content and then there's the vast bureaucratic and community-meeting underworld below. Some level of underworld (policy) knowledge is required to get along around here. (And/or just copy what you see other people doing and not getting yelled at for and you'll probably be fine.)

People with actual jobs who get paid for their coveted specialist skills often find us confounding and rightly so! That said I *do* hope you hang around.

Cheers,

jengod (talk) 18:21, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

I just saw Special:Diff/1312565285 and I thought I'd give you some advice. Firstly, minor edits are only for wholly uncontroversial edits which do not change the meaning of the article; since this edit added content, it shouldn't have been marked as minor. If in doubt, it's better to err on the side of not marking an edit as minor. Secondly, the lead should be a summary of information contained in the article's body, so when adding new information it's better not to add it directly to the lead. Instead, add it in the most relevant section. Wikipedia has a lot of policies, so please expect to get everything wrong at some point, but hopefully you'll learn from people's pointers, stick around, and continue to improve Wikipedia! lp0 on fire () 15:13, 14 November 2025 (UTC)

Hi ProfKnots. Thank you for your work on Hard unknot. Another editor, Klbrain, has reviewed it as part of new pages patrol and left the following comment:

Thanks for helpfully creating this page. It's so well-written, that I think that its better on unknot, where is provides helpful references and background, as well as further details!

To reply, leave a comment here and begin it with {{Re|Klbrain}}. (Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

Klbrain (talk) 10:00, 14 March 2026 (UTC)

@Klbrain: Hello, I am relatively new to this so I'm not sure if it's better as a standalone or a section of the unknot page. I hope that a decision to merge them is based on some sort of concensus and not done unilaterally. ProfKnots (talk) 07:20, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

As you can see in my edit summary, I did it 'boldly' as part of New Page Patrol, as I felt that case was fairly straightforward; the protocol is at Wikipedia:New pages patrol#Merging. We can certainly roll it back and go to a broader discussion to decide the matter. I felt that there was significant overlap, and the merge greatly improves in unknot page, and that seems to me to be better for readers. Let me know if you'd like a rollback. Klbrain (talk) 10:58, 15 March 2026 (UTC)