4 ms·
I like the idea, but one thing about Wikipedia is that with technical or granular topics it approaches things in a focused way. A specific molecular biology t
by duxup 2y ago
I like the idea, but one thing about Wikipedia is that with technical or granular topics it approaches things in a focused way. A specific molecular biology term's page isn't there to explain exactly how it fits into a larger biology topic. It makes random pages difficult to glean information from.
Even wikipedia articles I understand, more on computer topics, fall into the category of "the only people who understand this page are people who ... already understand it / don't need to read this".
Granted sometimes the social media context is kinda opaque, but usually "man fall down it funny" is pretty universal.
- myself248 2y agoMath articles are excruciatingly bad on this. I find myself setting the language to "simple english" and it helps.
- duxup 2y agoWikipedia math articles all remind me of what i learned in High School, that math is absolutely the worst to learn from someone who "just gets it" as often those folks have no concept how someone else might not "just get it". I suspect the wikipiedia articles are written by folks who "just get it".
- wwweb 2y agoA wiki (or any encyclopedia, for that matter) is not meant to be an introduction or a HOWTO.
- duxup 2y agoI can understand that. Having said that some topics (history) are surprisingly easy to pick up articles with lots of background and etc. If you look up a battle you'll get a short history of the war, days before the battle, explanations why say a given soldier might struggle and etc. Other topics are almost dictionary level simplistic.
- hnuser123456 2y agoI'm around calc 2 level, and spent some time learning ANN architectures, but it's taken a very long time to increase my ability to parse the more arcane topics since graduating. For example, this[1] is something I'd like to be able to just glance over and know all the applications and appreciate the beauty... but it's very hard to prevent my eyes from glossing over. Maybe someone has a youtube video on the topic that makes it easier to catch up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp_space
- layman51 2y agoSome other commenters have offered the idea of an algorithm to steer the randomness of the articles. I wonder if an algorithm would help with this issue of having random articles be too technical for you even though you are interested in the larger topic.
- TZubiri 2y ago>"the only people who understand this page are people who ... already understand it / don't need to read this". That is provably false
- duxup 2y agoI like to think of it as amusingly “dramatic” rather than false. ;) Way back when I was in college and the internet was new-ish. There were a few places you could ask math questions. A classmate of mine found that if he just asked a question online he would never get any responses. So what he would do is add some false generalizations in his question. In doing that he would be inundated with people answering his question, even if just to prove him wrong.
- TZubiri 2y agoI don't think it's relevant in this case. But it's a well known internet law https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
- duxup 2y agoThat's a fun law. I've bumped into it a few times asking an AI related question and part of my understanding was a bit off. Even being slightly off rather than completely seems to bring out more enthusiastic responses.
- joshuahedlund 2y agoMaybe pairing this with an LLM could be useful here?
- Matthyze 2y agoWikipedia is useful for reference, but not education. Not sure whether that's intentional.