3 ms·

Why do people post wikipedia links with absolutely no context or comment?

• dang 6y ago
  wikipedia.org is penalized on HN the same way that most major media sites are. We took the penalty off a while back, but had to put it back on because there were too many generic submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20wikipedia%20submi&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Wikipedia submissions are ok when the topic is obscure and there isn't any other good third party article to submit. They're bad when the topic is generic or well-covered. Wikipedia itself is already a generic site, and the combination of generic site and generic topic leads to low-quality discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... But when the topic is unpredictable and mostly unheard-of, such submissions can be quite good. In this case a bit of googling revealed a 1998 article that hasn't been discussed on HN before, so I've changed the URL to that from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework. Any other good non-obvious article would have done as well; people will probably mostly comment on RDF and the semantic web in general.
• JadeNB 6y ago
  I often find Wikipedia-only links handy to introduce me to topics that I never even knew existed—that is, where, in some sense, "this topic exists" is interesting in itself. One particularly memorable one was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/199_398_500_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/199_398_500_A (though I can no longer find the HN link to it); it's then easy enough for me to Google around for more context if I care to do so.
  • tosh 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011467
• numbsafari 6y ago
  Karma farming.