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deepnet

I pay monthly to wikipedia, I use it tens of times a day, it is a fantastic unparalleled resource - a real public good.

Wikipedia is a proof of a utopian vision that infused the early web - ensuring public rights wins public contribution.

Humanities collective knowledge is better distributed because of Wikipedia, a true wonder of the modern world.

IMHO, we must treasure wikipedia as it is not clear it could happen again and it embiggens us all.

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Wikipedia confirms that "embiggens" is a made up word from the Simpsons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_the_Iconoclast#Embiggen_a...

I'm not sure if you are passing judgement but this is how language evolves.

I'm perfectly cromulent with that as well.

This feels ungrammatical to me. I think "I find it perfectly cromulent." feels more correct.

(I only comment because I'm amused to find I've heard "cromulent" used as a "real word" enough that my brain has intuited rules for its usage.)

You failed at trying to make yourself sound smart by using a fancy word.

To be fair, all words are made up. Their usage is what makes them relevant.

This is so well put. It should be engraved over the entrance to a library or public monument somewhere.

Or at least the linguistics department at the local community college.

Also every dictionary should have a disclaimer written on its cover with big, bold letters:

DICTIONARIES ARE DESCRIPTIVE, NOT PRESCRIPTIVE. THEY DOCUMENT HOW WORDS ARE COMMONLY USED, THEY DO NOT DEFINE THEIR MEANINGS.

Although this is not universally accepted. This old DFW essay on the topic is good reading.

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...

Dictionaries are embiggened by new words.

I think wikipedia (along with Google) really allowed for the current transition to over-abundance of easily accessibly information -- at least in developed countries. For better or worse, I think we've started moving towards only considering application of knowledge to be a worthwhile topic of study, instead of just gaining it. If this is true, it'd be pretty catastrophic for services like wikipedia to suddenly disappear.

I feel like wikipedia killed the web in a way. Anytime you search for something 95% of the time wikipedia is the first result and thus 99% of the time it is I go to it for information. What websites or innovations have we missed out on because of this?

Maybe the encyclopedias would have developed micropayments? Or maybe they would have just gone for a traditional expensive paywall approach and information would have been denied to the masses?

Well there is no way that information wouldn't have gotten out. For the sake of argument I'm merely pointing out that having one website dominate as a source of information may have hurt the web in general.

Indeed, it's too bad that libraries were created as well. Just think of how many other knowledge sharing techniques would have been developed in its place. I know some of the other contenders were "smoke signals", "bird whistles", the list would be longer but I refuse to accept readily accessible, free sources of knowledge. And the smoke signals have been strangely quiet as of late.

In a library you get Bill O'Reilly and Howard Zinn and everyone in between. But on Wikipedia, you get the loudest and most obsessive voice.

Yeah.. Wiki's systemic culture problems have chased off a number of editors. The own admins don't even follow the site's rules when its convenient for them not to.

This is not a matter of opinion. One such rule is that there is a procedure to go through for deleting pages - I've personally been victim to a now-ex admin who killed a page I was working on, completely bypassing the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place. (Said admin was later kicked off the site for bot editing without approval, but not for ignoring deletion procedure.)

The site's still quite valuable as long as you avoid politically charged topics (and run, don't walk, from the talk pages), but they are open to being forked if this continues.

Wikipedia is as things should be. Consider why you go to it 99 out of 100 times. It's not just because it usually shows up first in Google. It's because you know that all the other results suck.

It is a limitation of your search engine, not of wikipedia

Definitely Encyclopædia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com) and Microsoft Encarta used to be much more popular.

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