7 ms·

You really have to love Wikipedia. It's barely a week old and you already have a page with so many references and detailed information. Thank you, all the anony

You really have to love Wikipedia. It's barely a week old and you already have a page with so many references and detailed information. Thank you, all the anonymous contributors.

akuji1993 8y ago
Yet there are still people claiming the site is not good for anything. Of course, you shouldn't base your phd paper on it, but I'll use it for any information first checkpoint, all the time.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
typon 8y ago
Wikipedia is the best website for following: 1. Current events. 2. Sports tournaments. The information entropy level is quite high, with basically no ads, extremely good formatting (relevant tables, charts etc.), and relatively unbiased. This doesn't even mention the benefit of getting simple background information on the subjects with just a simple click (or even a hover these days) It's really a treasure.
- roystonvassey 8y ago
  I find it even good for medical conditions, condensed history of major events, understanding geography and biography of actors, sportspersons and politicians. Actually, isn't it the * best * first website to learn about anything?
  - jonathanpoulter 8y ago
    I find learning mathematical concepts from Wikipedia very difficult
    - devrand 8y ago
      Have you tried simple Wikipedia? I find it way easier to conceptualization the topics there and then move onto the main Wikipedia to get more detail, as needed.
    - RugnirViking 8y ago
      I also agree, and would further that any relatively technically involved concept tends to contain the most complicated form of that topic, for example the wikipedia page on lift goes into some pretty intense detail. This is the natural result for a website written by users (those with lots of knowledge write it for others who have lots of knowledge). Even simple wikipedia is not immune to this, due to explaining the concept theoretically instead of taking example problems. I do not mean to say that I think wikipedia is bad or that others do better. I'm not even sure such a problem is solvable at all (making it useful for both beginners and experts)
      - herewulf 8y ago
        On the other hand, articles written by experts with full detail is much more useful to those already well versed in a given field. To use myself as an example: I would look elsewhere for computing or linguistics information if the articles were all written for beginners.
        RugnirViking 8y ago
        I don't disagree with you - the articles are not at all useless in topics for which I am well versed. Like I say, the issue that is perhaps unsolvable is some intuative way to have the article useful to everyone at once while not bogging them down in useless info
    - fokinsean 8y ago
      You should check out simple wikipedia, there's not a page for everything but there's quite a bit. Here's an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(mathematics) https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(mathematics)
  - typon 8y ago
    That's all true. I'm making a stronger claim. I believe Wikipedia is the best website for the two things I mentioned. There isn't a second competitor that comes even close to the breadth, depth and convenience provided by Wikipedia.
    - cm2187 8y ago
      And all of that thanks to its painstaking manual curation which is interesting in the current context of automating everything.
  - golergka 8y ago
    Please don't try to learn about controversial political topics there. The amount of editorial wars going on is stuggering - and the worst of it, you won't be able to tell when you're looking at a propaganda piece instead of an objective article because you need prior knowledge for that, and Wikipedia is exactly the place where people get their prior knowledge.
    - matthewmacleod 8y ago
      It’s usually insanely obvious, really.
    - olivermarks 8y ago
      I trust Wikipedia for basic historical information, biographies etc. I feel sad that encylopedias and their peer reviews have been obliterated as a definitive source of knowledge and replaced by something which has a questionable editorial model. I use Wikipedia a lot but don't see it as a 'gold standard' of verified information. It seems a lot people do... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-...
      - magduf 8y ago
        The editorial model seems to work pretty well for things which aren't controversial, and unlike old-style encyclopedias, you can see the edits made and the discussions behind them. With Britannica, you basically just had to trust them.
    - vilhelm_s 8y ago
      The same is true for non-Wikipedia sources too, right? If you learn about political topics from, say, a newspaper article, you will not be able to tell if you're looking at a propaganda piece because the newspaper is exactly where you get your prior knowledge.
      - golergka 8y ago
        I think there's a difference: you know that newspaper won't offer you an objective prior knowledge. But with Wikipedia, too many people have such assumption.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > I find it even good for medical conditions As in you read several books about a medical condition, and then see what Wikipedia says about it? Because if you just start by reading the Wikipedia article, you'd have no idea whether it's wrong or not. (It's usually wrong.)
    - grkvlt 8y ago
      Is it? Why on earth don't you fix it when you see that? You don't even need an account, if that's what your worried about. I'm surprised at the idea though, and pretty skeptical that it's actually the case since I would have assumed many others with medical knowledge would also have noticed, and one of them would have corrected things eventually.
- ythn 8y ago
  It's what happens when profit is not your primary (or even secondary) goal. That's why my personal company will never go public. From what I understand it would force me to put profit as my primary goal, even if I value quality more than profit.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    In theory, you can incorporate as a Benefit Corp[1], which "includes positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment in addition to profit as its legally defined goals." I'm not sure if that works in practice, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
- Hamuko 8y ago
  Well, popular sports tournaments. Not all of them have current information.
  - bhandziuk 8y ago
    I know right! My kickball league isn't on there.
- and0 8y ago
  Seconding sports tournaments. The World Cup has been much easier to follow on Wikipedia, often in real time, than FIFA's own site.
- nickysielicki 8y ago
  I strongly disagree about current events. The Merrick Garland wikipedia page was a mess immediately after he was nominated, and I've just checked and the word "unprecedented" appears 7 times, in spite of the fact that it is by-no-means unprecedented for the senate to not consider a nomination [1]. There are a lot of partisan editors that wish to astroturf for their own political convictions, and because Wikipedia articles are generally so nonpartisan after they've had some time to mature, I think it's especially problematic because readers don't realize that a fast-moving article is nowhere near up to standards. [1]: "During the 1852 campaign between Democrat Franklin Pierce and Whig Winfield Scott, Justice John McKinley died in July. President Millard Fillmore, a Whig who was not running for reelection, nominated three candidates — one in August, one in January and one in February. The Democratic-controlled Senate took no action on two candidates and the third withdrew after the Senate postponed a vote until after inauguration. One of Fillmore’s nominations was never even considered by the Senate, while the other was simply tabled." from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/16/does-the-senate-have-a-constitutional-responsibility-to-consider-a-supreme-court-nomination/?utm_term=.767303c1094b https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/...
  - blondie9x 8y ago
    Unprecedented in recent history. There really should be a law that the Senate needs to start holding hearings within X days. Otherwise partisanship will creep up on either side or multiple sides if we ever move beyond two parties.
    - koolba 8y ago
      > Unprecedented in recent history. There really should be a law that the Senate needs to start holding hearings within X days. Otherwise partisanship will creep up on either side or multiple sides if we ever move beyond two parties. Similar to a pocket veto, not acting upon a nomination is a form of action. It's an indirect mechanism to reject a nominee. I'm pretty sure changing this to mandate a hearing within a fixed number of days would require a constitutional amendment, not just a regular law, so is essentially impossible.
- vitalique 8y ago
  There's a special portal for current events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events.
- slowferrari 8y ago
  I would add: 3. Car Model history crazy the amount of information available on wiki around automobiles/auto programs (DARPA, etc)
- appleflaxen 8y ago
  > with basically no ads, extremely good formatting (relevant tables, charts etc.), and relatively unbiased. these are qualities of a low entropy system.
sparkie 8y ago
The downside is that in a few years, most of those references will be 404.
- throwawayqdhd 8y ago
  The upside is that we can still edit them all anytime :)
2bitencryption 8y ago
> barely a week old Heck, I remember the day the news broke, I thought "Wow, so many news articles on this... let me just head to Wikipedia and see the consensus. The news had broken just hours beforehand, and already Wikipedia had all the info and a creative-commons graphic of a map of the cave.
dang 8y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497625 and marked it off-topic. Not that there's anything wrong with your comment or Wikipedia.

You really have to love Wikipedia. It's barely a week old and you already have a page with so many references and detailed information. Thank you, all the anonymous contributors.

akuji1993 8y ago

Yet there are still people claiming the site is not good for anything. Of course, you shouldn't base your phd paper on it, but I'll use it for any information first checkpoint, all the time.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

typon 8y ago

Wikipedia is the best website for following: 1. Current events. 2. Sports tournaments. The information entropy level is quite high, with basically no ads, extremely good formatting (relevant tables, charts etc.), and relatively unbiased. This doesn't even mention the benefit of getting simple background information on the subjects with just a simple click (or even a hover these days) It's really a treasure.

roystonvassey 8y ago
I find it even good for medical conditions, condensed history of major events, understanding geography and biography of actors, sportspersons and politicians. Actually, isn't it the * best * first website to learn about anything?
- jonathanpoulter 8y ago
  I find learning mathematical concepts from Wikipedia very difficult
  - devrand 8y ago
    Have you tried simple Wikipedia? I find it way easier to conceptualization the topics there and then move onto the main Wikipedia to get more detail, as needed.
  - RugnirViking 8y ago
    I also agree, and would further that any relatively technically involved concept tends to contain the most complicated form of that topic, for example the wikipedia page on lift goes into some pretty intense detail. This is the natural result for a website written by users (those with lots of knowledge write it for others who have lots of knowledge). Even simple wikipedia is not immune to this, due to explaining the concept theoretically instead of taking example problems. I do not mean to say that I think wikipedia is bad or that others do better. I'm not even sure such a problem is solvable at all (making it useful for both beginners and experts)
    - herewulf 8y ago
      On the other hand, articles written by experts with full detail is much more useful to those already well versed in a given field. To use myself as an example: I would look elsewhere for computing or linguistics information if the articles were all written for beginners.
      - RugnirViking 8y ago
        I don't disagree with you - the articles are not at all useless in topics for which I am well versed. Like I say, the issue that is perhaps unsolvable is some intuative way to have the article useful to everyone at once while not bogging them down in useless info
  - fokinsean 8y ago
    You should check out simple wikipedia, there's not a page for everything but there's quite a bit. Here's an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(mathematics) https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(mathematics)
- typon 8y ago
  That's all true. I'm making a stronger claim. I believe Wikipedia is the best website for the two things I mentioned. There isn't a second competitor that comes even close to the breadth, depth and convenience provided by Wikipedia.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    And all of that thanks to its painstaking manual curation which is interesting in the current context of automating everything.
- golergka 8y ago
  Please don't try to learn about controversial political topics there. The amount of editorial wars going on is stuggering - and the worst of it, you won't be able to tell when you're looking at a propaganda piece instead of an objective article because you need prior knowledge for that, and Wikipedia is exactly the place where people get their prior knowledge.
  - matthewmacleod 8y ago
    It’s usually insanely obvious, really.
  - olivermarks 8y ago
    I trust Wikipedia for basic historical information, biographies etc. I feel sad that encylopedias and their peer reviews have been obliterated as a definitive source of knowledge and replaced by something which has a questionable editorial model. I use Wikipedia a lot but don't see it as a 'gold standard' of verified information. It seems a lot people do... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-...
    - magduf 8y ago
      The editorial model seems to work pretty well for things which aren't controversial, and unlike old-style encyclopedias, you can see the edits made and the discussions behind them. With Britannica, you basically just had to trust them.
  - vilhelm_s 8y ago
    The same is true for non-Wikipedia sources too, right? If you learn about political topics from, say, a newspaper article, you will not be able to tell if you're looking at a propaganda piece because the newspaper is exactly where you get your prior knowledge.
    - golergka 8y ago
      I think there's a difference: you know that newspaper won't offer you an objective prior knowledge. But with Wikipedia, too many people have such assumption.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > I find it even good for medical conditions As in you read several books about a medical condition, and then see what Wikipedia says about it? Because if you just start by reading the Wikipedia article, you'd have no idea whether it's wrong or not. (It's usually wrong.)
  - grkvlt 8y ago
    Is it? Why on earth don't you fix it when you see that? You don't even need an account, if that's what your worried about. I'm surprised at the idea though, and pretty skeptical that it's actually the case since I would have assumed many others with medical knowledge would also have noticed, and one of them would have corrected things eventually.
ythn 8y ago
It's what happens when profit is not your primary (or even secondary) goal. That's why my personal company will never go public. From what I understand it would force me to put profit as my primary goal, even if I value quality more than profit.
- icebraining 8y ago
  In theory, you can incorporate as a Benefit Corp[1], which "includes positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment in addition to profit as its legally defined goals." I'm not sure if that works in practice, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
Hamuko 8y ago
Well, popular sports tournaments. Not all of them have current information.
- bhandziuk 8y ago
  I know right! My kickball league isn't on there.
and0 8y ago
Seconding sports tournaments. The World Cup has been much easier to follow on Wikipedia, often in real time, than FIFA's own site.
nickysielicki 8y ago
I strongly disagree about current events. The Merrick Garland wikipedia page was a mess immediately after he was nominated, and I've just checked and the word "unprecedented" appears 7 times, in spite of the fact that it is by-no-means unprecedented for the senate to not consider a nomination [1]. There are a lot of partisan editors that wish to astroturf for their own political convictions, and because Wikipedia articles are generally so nonpartisan after they've had some time to mature, I think it's especially problematic because readers don't realize that a fast-moving article is nowhere near up to standards. [1]: "During the 1852 campaign between Democrat Franklin Pierce and Whig Winfield Scott, Justice John McKinley died in July. President Millard Fillmore, a Whig who was not running for reelection, nominated three candidates — one in August, one in January and one in February. The Democratic-controlled Senate took no action on two candidates and the third withdrew after the Senate postponed a vote until after inauguration. One of Fillmore’s nominations was never even considered by the Senate, while the other was simply tabled." from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/16/does-the-senate-have-a-constitutional-responsibility-to-consider-a-supreme-court-nomination/?utm_term=.767303c1094b https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/...
- blondie9x 8y ago
  Unprecedented in recent history. There really should be a law that the Senate needs to start holding hearings within X days. Otherwise partisanship will creep up on either side or multiple sides if we ever move beyond two parties.
  - koolba 8y ago
    > Unprecedented in recent history. There really should be a law that the Senate needs to start holding hearings within X days. Otherwise partisanship will creep up on either side or multiple sides if we ever move beyond two parties. Similar to a pocket veto, not acting upon a nomination is a form of action. It's an indirect mechanism to reject a nominee. I'm pretty sure changing this to mandate a hearing within a fixed number of days would require a constitutional amendment, not just a regular law, so is essentially impossible.
vitalique 8y ago
There's a special portal for current events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events.
slowferrari 8y ago
I would add: 3. Car Model history crazy the amount of information available on wiki around automobiles/auto programs (DARPA, etc)
appleflaxen 8y ago
> with basically no ads, extremely good formatting (relevant tables, charts etc.), and relatively unbiased. these are qualities of a low entropy system.

sparkie 8y ago

The downside is that in a few years, most of those references will be 404.

throwawayqdhd 8y ago
The upside is that we can still edit them all anytime :)

2bitencryption 8y ago

> barely a week old Heck, I remember the day the news broke, I thought "Wow, so many news articles on this... let me just head to Wikipedia and see the consensus. The news had broken just hours beforehand, and already Wikipedia had all the info and a creative-commons graphic of a map of the cave.

dang 8y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497625 and marked it off-topic. Not that there's anything wrong with your comment or Wikipedia.