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> Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge Wikipedia is far, far short of the total of 'a

> Can you imagine telling someone 15 years ago that the Web would have a free repository of all human knowledge Wikipedia is far, far short of the total of 'all human knowledge'. It's probably a good primer for the type of information that consitutes such knowledge but it's barely skin-deep. Even the British Library, for all its faults, holds magnitudes more information; it adds three million items every year, which is half as many as Wikipedia has total articles.

derefr 10y ago
Words, surely; information, I'm not as sure about. I would wonder how much content an entire library truly holds if you were to try to abridge all its books together into one tome with every redundant statement stripped out, such that each fact or idea was only elucidated once, in one way.
- CJefferson 10y ago
  I can pick a couple of mathematics books off my shelf, where less than 5% of their content is on wikipedia -- wikipedia is good for topics which many people understand, but in my experience gets very bad for more difficult topics. This partly makes sense, they are difficult to write about, and difficult to read without being an expert so is wikipedia even the right place?
  - dTal 10y ago
    In my perfect fantasy world Wikipedia articles would be so well-written that as you delved further into a niche field, they seamlessly segue into textbook chapters.
  - balabaster 10y ago
    The problem with this is the way that Wikipedia is moderated. You get moderators who take it upon themselves to be God of a section and don't let anything through that doesn't meet with their views. There are many anecdotes scattered around the internet of experts with first hand knowledge of a topic and they can't get their expertise included because some moderator or group of moderators think they know better and censor the information from ever seeing the light of day.

derefr 10y ago

Words, surely; information, I'm not as sure about. I would wonder how much content an entire library truly holds if you were to try to abridge all its books together into one tome with every redundant statement stripped out, such that each fact or idea was only elucidated once, in one way.

CJefferson 10y ago
I can pick a couple of mathematics books off my shelf, where less than 5% of their content is on wikipedia -- wikipedia is good for topics which many people understand, but in my experience gets very bad for more difficult topics. This partly makes sense, they are difficult to write about, and difficult to read without being an expert so is wikipedia even the right place?
- dTal 10y ago
  In my perfect fantasy world Wikipedia articles would be so well-written that as you delved further into a niche field, they seamlessly segue into textbook chapters.
- balabaster 10y ago
  The problem with this is the way that Wikipedia is moderated. You get moderators who take it upon themselves to be God of a section and don't let anything through that doesn't meet with their views. There are many anecdotes scattered around the internet of experts with first hand knowledge of a topic and they can't get their expertise included because some moderator or group of moderators think they know better and censor the information from ever seeing the light of day.