4 ms·
Get together and fork (or make your own) Wikipedia. Seriously. Wikipedia seems very good at providing detailed, accurate, concise facts of well-known, non-cont
by armchairhacker 4mo ago
Get together and fork (or make your own) Wikipedia.
Seriously. Wikipedia seems very good at providing detailed, accurate, concise facts of well-known, non-controversial topics. It’s by far the best in this area. Unfortunately (perhaps as a sacrifice for this competence) it sets a high and inconsistent bar for “well-known” and has a specific bias in controversial topics*.
On the other end of the spectrum, search engines and ChatGPT are basically encyclopedias covering everything, and can give you multiple perspectives, but sometimes at the cost of accuracy and quality. Typing “Odin language” into any search engine that isn’t complete trash yields as the first result Odin’s website, which is a better resource to learn about Odin than any Wikipedia article.
If you want a middle ground, make one. It’s probably hard, evidenced by Grokopedia not being cited or used much to my knowledge (and having embarrassing AI hallucinations at least on launch). But Wikipedia seems to have locked into its current form, for better or worse (IMO better as long as it retains quality articles for well-known, non-controversial topics).
* To be clear, any article on a controversial topic that doesn’t provide multiple perspectives is biased, and those that do are also biased but now in multiple directions. Still, I get the impression that in Wikipedia there’s only one bias direction in all articles
- bawolff 4mo agoIts a good reminder that all wikipedia software is GPL, and the article content is CC-BY-SA. Anyone who thinks they can do better has the right to fork. Most of Wikipedia's rules are there for a reason, and i suspect people who fork would find out why the hard way, but hey, only one way to find out.
- ButlerianJihad 4mo agoHey, you can fork 100% of the content, and several sites already have; but can you also fork enough volunteer editors, sysops, bureaucrats? Can you fork enough DevOps and cloud architects? Can you fork the WikiMania events and the assets that have been collected & established by the Wikimedia Foundation? I mean, some dudes way back in the day successfully forked Spanish-language Wikipedia because of some advertising disputes. Can anyone truly replicate success with a forked enwiki?
- bawolff 4mo agoNetwork effects are always hard, although i dont think you have to have all that from day 1.
- LoveMortuus 4mo agoI guess Elon Musk is doing something like that: https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language At least there, the Odin article still lives on.
- armchairhacker 4mo agoBelow https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language#type-system https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language#type-s..., there’s a random citation inside a code span…
- LoveMortuus 4mo agoDo suggest edits so that it'll get better with time!
- lerno 4mo agoThe C3 grokipedia entry was horribly bad, so I don't really have a favourable impression of it.