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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

> Stupid elitist title.

Perhaps, but a comment like this lowers quality even further. Instead, why not suggest a better title? We're always happy to change them when users find a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) way to phrase things.

We already changed this one from the baity original title to a more neutral subtitle, in accordance with the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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The current title, "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows a less trashy internet is possible", is great. The internet is quite trashy. It has no moderation. Imagine Hacker News without moderation.

And yes, the original title was horrible. Wikipedia is another site that makes the Internet less trashy. And it is entirely possible for Wikipedia to become as authoritative as Stanford's.

Because Wikipedia is a work in progress, some articles are fairly authoritative, for example featured or good articles, while some are not, for example an unreferenced stub.

Sorry, I wasn't aware that this was a moderated title. Perhaps something like "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows that high quality online encyclopedias are possible" (not a writer myself). "Trashy" sounds so dismissive, hence elitist in conjunction with "Stanford".

Ah, good point. Happy to change it, but we need it to fit within 80 chars!

Re moderated titles: we always try to use language from the article itself, not to make up our own. We manage to do that nearly every time.

Edit: is it better now?

That title is better, thanks.

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