Talk:Map folding

Question about the "refspam" removal of my recent edit

Hello Eigebra,

I noticed that my recent edit to this article was removed with the edit summary “refspam.”

Could you please clarify which part of the edit was considered refspam? The edit added a brief description of a published research result on stamp folding, with a citation to the corresponding peer-reviewed paper and its DOI.

I also made an edit to the “Tiling the plane with convex pentagons” article on the same day, and that edit was also removed as refspam. Since these were separate articles concerning published mathematical research, I would appreciate it if you could clarify what specifically in the edits was considered spam, so that I can understand the relevant Wikipedia guidelines and avoid making inappropriate edits.

Thank you. Yoichi1210 (talk) 06:32, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

A couple of questions for you:

• Your contributions to Wikipedia so far have been primarily to add references authored by Shintaro Sakai, to articles that have no connection with each other except through Sakai. Do you have a connection to Sakai? If so it is a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use to make this kind of edit without disclosing the connection; see WP:COI.
• The reference you were trying to add states in its abstract "The main contribution of this work is not the introduction of new counting techniques", but the text you were adding here starts "A boundary-based counting approach to the stamp folding problem was introduced". Can you explain this apparent contradiction?

Anyway, I agree with the removal. The text added seems to have been added as an excuse to cite the paper, rather than because that text would improve reader understanding of map folding, and your primary purpose here so far appears to be to add citations to one researcher, rather than to improve the encyclopedia, as WP:REFSPAM describes. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:57, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification.

Yes, I am Shintaro Sakai, the author of the paper I was trying to cite. I understand now that I should have disclosed this connection, and I apologize for not doing so.

My intention was not to promote the paper or its author, but to add a concise description of a published result that I believed was relevant to the existing discussion of the stamp folding problem. I understand, however, that my edits may give the appearance of adding references primarily because they are my own publications.

Regarding the wording of the stamp-folding edit, I agree that my wording could have been more precise. The paper does not claim to introduce a fundamentally new counting technique; rather, its main contribution is a structural, boundary-based analysis that explains the combinatorial mechanism behind recurrence-type relations. I can therefore see why “a boundary-based counting approach was introduced” could have sounded stronger than what the paper claims.

If appropriate, I would be happy to propose any relevant addition on the article's talk page instead of editing the article directly, so that other editors can assess whether the material improves the article.

Thank you for pointing this out. Yoichi1210 (talk) 08:26, 19 September 2026 (UTC)