5 ms·
Here's one of my favorite passages from a field guide: Silent flight enables owls in flight to hear the movements of small rodents, while in turn it keeps the
by bcbrown 7y ago
Here's one of my favorite passages from a field guide:
Silent flight enables owls in flight to hear the movements of small rodents, while in turn it keeps the sharp-eared prey in the dark over someone coming for dinner. This tempts one to fancy that mice live in utter ignorance of owls except as invisible agents of disappearances from the family.
- freepor 7y agoThis is my least favorite thing about Wikipedia -- it's taken all of the whimsy out of general knowledge resources.
- ygra 7y agoIn the same way as any encyclopedia that's not deliberately whimsical (in which case its general utility of obtaining knowledge may be more limited than, those multi-tome things or, well, Wikipedia).
- freepor 6y agoBut the best encyclopedia, Brittanica, had flights of whimsy. Sentences like "Bostonians are incorrigible jaywalkers." Wikipedia killed Brittanica, and ultimately is far more valuable to the world, but I miss those sentences in Brittanica.
- BiteCode_dev 7y agoYeah but then, do you want "whimsy" in sensible articles like political/religious/ethical related ones? Then would one expect wikipedia editors to enforce this policy on top of the work they already do? And using what criteria?
- freepor 6y agoNo, Wikipedia is not set up for whimsy. This kind of thing has to come from a single author with a point of view, not from a crowdsourced article with conflicting points of view.
- the_af 6y agoI wouldn't say it's taken all the whimsy, but the community attempts to keep an "encyclopedic" tone. In same cases it's turned into overcorrection from the good old Wikipedia days when, for example, the article about vampires was mostly not about actual vampire bats, or even about folklore vampires, but about a self-proclaimed "lifestyle" of people who supposedly consider themselves "real vampires". I remember those days! It was fun to see the rampant edit wars between serious and fringe editors.
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoI'd say Wikipedia is generally less dry than the average technical book. It's less whimsical than some blog posts, sure, but Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopaedia (roughly speaking).
- yogrish 7y agoWatch the exact scene how an owl catches its prey while they are totally ignorant. Watch for pair of lights(owlEyes) to see the onset of owl. https://youtu.be/2Ol4rbYPYQc https://youtu.be/2Ol4rbYPYQc