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Weird side point, but I'd be really interested to hear how people weight the importance of Wikipedia text vs media vs history. For me the first is 99% of the po
by thom 12y ago
Weird side point, but I'd be really interested to hear how people weight the importance of Wikipedia text vs media vs history. For me the first is 99% of the point, but clearly others feel differently.
- sp332 12y agoYeah, you're probably right. But the history can be really important on certain pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671756 And images can make some of the math articles useful since they are too-often dense pages of formulas.
- valarauca1 12y agoIsn't most the math just latex? So it could be rendered client side?
- sp332 12y agoI mean the formulas are not very good at explaining the concepts. Sometimes it's helpful to have a picture.
- sixothree 12y agoI find that Wikipedia's text heavy presentation disappointing especially considering that the articles are almost exclusively what I would consider extremely terse. It's like the worst of both worlds.
- rodgerd 12y agoHistory and talk pages can be very important. When I saw that the film Defiance was based on a interesting-sounding real set of events, I looked at them on Wikipedia. The history and talk pages had an ongoing edit war with a sizable number of commentators who appeared to feel that the Bielskis should be treated as criminals and murderers rather than fêted as heroes, due to their killing of local Nazi sympathisers. If you just stuck to the hashed-out Wikipedia page that was current, you'd be completely oblivious to the whole controversy.
- gyom 12y agoI've never considered this, but the history of Wikipedia over the next 100 years might be an insanely valuable source of insight about culture.