Wikipedia:Stackexchange and Reddit

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

We could forge better external collaboration with the purely education-oriented sites like math.stackexchange, and the education-oriented subreddits, like r/askscience/ and related - perhaps write them some quick guides for both finding good information in our sites, and assisting participation in our sites (and vice versa), so that we can hook /r/fashion/ together with WikiProject Fashion, and /r/chemicalreactiongifs/ with WikiProject Chemistry and Commons, and etc, in both directions. They're highly-active locations, filled with smart and helpful people. We could be helping and mingling with each other more. Not all of us, but some of us, more easily. More interconnected-web, less gated-community. Looser boundaries, and more informal pathways.

Guides

Make posts that are good enough to be permanent guides, linked from each subreddit's sidebar. (each subreddit has a sidebar, of FAQs and quick links to important threads.)

Mix with the brilliant w:WP:WPMED intro video.

Overview

Hook together,

maybe even

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive and https://simple.wikipedia.org/ - as people who are (potentially) skilled at using a reduced vocabulary to explain complex things.

Example - watches

/r/Watches + /r/WatchHorology + w:en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Watches = Happiness!

WikiProject Watches currently has:

1 article rated/peer-checked as "Good" quality: Bovet Fleurier

1 list rated/peer-checked as "Featured" quality: List of chronometers on HMS Beagle

8 "B" quality articles

Main category: Category:Watches

Those 2 subreddits have thousands of subscribers, contributing to dozens of threads each day. There are experts and passionate amateurs in there, who enjoy sharing knowledge and helping newcomers. We are natural allies.

Reddit wiki bots

There have been a few bots over the years that detect comment-links to Wikipedia and reply with an excerpt. Including:

WikiSummarizerBot - 2021–present - (github) - It can handle multiple links (example), AND section links (example) - More info: Intro post in r/botwatch
WikipediaSummary - ~2021
wikipedia_text_bot - ~2020
WikiTextBot - 2017–2020 - (github) - It could handle multiple links (example), but did not work with #section links. (request filed)
Autowikibot - 2014–2015 - (github) - It did work for #section links (example).

r/Wikipedia and r/MediaWiki

There are subreddits dedicated to

Wikipedia - https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/
MediaWiki - https://www.reddit.com/r/mediawiki/

If you use the popular RES extension to enable fancy auto-expansion, the old (non-beta) design looks like this: http://imgur.com/u5II7JF

RedditEnhancementSuite

The hugely popular browser extension RES (RedditEnhancementSuite), has a feature that expands links to Wikipedia. (screenshot)

Code: https://github.com/honestbleeps/Reddit-Enhancement-Suite/blob/master/lib/modules/hosts/wikipedia.js (open issues)

NOTE: As of 31 January 2022, RES is in maintenance mode, which means no new features will be rolled out. See the announcement by the developers on Reddit