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The first my reaction is to say it's pretty cool or something, but actually it isn't if I look at it more closely. You see, I don't really care about lots of in
by krick 12y ago
The first my reaction is to say it's pretty cool or something, but actually it isn't if I look at it more closely. You see, I don't really care about lots of information gathered on the website with one domain. In fact, ideally I would wish for exactly the opposite: if some information can be easily classified, then it should. What I mean is that adding every new article to wikipedia has its own drawbacks as well as value. Recently I was thinking about how cool it would be to have wikipedia accessible offline on some portable device — and it's nothing new, I remember edited versions of wikipedia for mobile devices before smartphones become popular, but this sort of things isn't very useful in many ways. On the other hand, realistically I would assume that all content I will need to look up in my portable wiki easily fits on modern storage cards even with some media-data. Even more than that: many articles become useless to me if images are removed. The only real problem is that I don't know what I will look up and it's very hard to define what's useful.
Anyway, perfect layout for animal articles is significantly different from perfect layout for math articles, so instead of populating wikipedia with rather obscure non-verified by humans information the really useful work would be making easy-to-use thematic resources as the existing ones made by academic people usually are totally unusable. That's where structured information should go in the first place.
However bots on wikipedia often do some useful work, what really makes wikipedia useful is mindful human work. Media-wiki engine isn't perfect for structuring information and is useful specifically for free-form, unstructured data populated by humans. I don't really see what is the use of populating wikipedia with thousands of auto-generated texts.