4 ms·
We already have that and it's Wikipedia.
by alisonatwork 1y ago
We already have that and it's Wikipedia.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoCan you imagine how much better it would be if people were paid to create the content!
- bawolff 1y agoI think it would be worse. Money tends to ruin collaborative communities.
- melagonster 1y agoThey should offer more money. Wikipedia invited some professor writing. thye take responsibility for their whole life on job.
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoProfessors don't necessarily want to waste their time fighting with Wikipedia admins.
- ars 1y agoIt doesn't need to be collaborative, people write books for money all the time. It's how the vast majority of human knowledge has been stored and perpetuated for millennia. This new business of people writing up their knowledge for free (wikpedia, stackexchange, forums, reddit, etc) is relatively new, and only semi-working.
- bawolff 1y agoNot just in the past. People write books today just as much as in the past. Even today, encyclopedia briticana is still selling an encyclopedia product for about $75 a year. The new business model is competiting with the old one. Generally the new model is winning on price and breadth, by a fairly wide margin. Accuracy seems about the same for both business models. A business model doesn't need to be perfect to win, it just needs to be slightly better. > It's how the vast majority of human knowledge has been stored and perpetuated for millennia. I think writing books for money is a newish phenomenom. I think historically you probably had more of a patronage system for most art. Selling your written work is a lot harder in the pre-printing press era.
- ars 1y ago> Generally the new model is winning on price and breadth, by a fairly wide margin. Accuracy seems about the same for both business models. I quite disagree on both counts. Unless by breadth you mean tons of different topics. But if you want info on a specific topic a book has far greater breadth than the new systems. Accuracy is also hit or miss, it depends on the topic. Highly charged topics are rarely accurate - at least with a book the bias is known and you can pick multiple books, online articles are a popularity contest/majority rules, rather than actual accuracy. Technical topics are pretty accurate, but often pretty shallow. Or worse: Great technical detail that is impossible to understand unless you already know the topic, in which case why do you need it?
- yreg 1y agoI don't think it would (and could) be any better. That being said Wikipedia is not a substitute of the "old" web.