Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayqdhd | Hacker News Reader

You really have to love Wikipedia. It's barely a week old and you already have a page with so many references and detailed information. Thank you, all the anonymous contributors.

View on HN

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497625 and marked it off-topic. Not that there's anything wrong with your comment or Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the best website for following:

1. Current events.

2. Sports tournaments.

The information entropy level is quite high, with basically no ads, extremely good formatting (relevant tables, charts etc.), and relatively unbiased.

This doesn't even mention the benefit of getting simple background information on the subjects with just a simple click (or even a hover these days)

It's really a treasure.

It's what happens when profit is not your primary (or even secondary) goal. That's why my personal company will never go public. From what I understand it would force me to put profit as my primary goal, even if I value quality more than profit.

In theory, you can incorporate as a Benefit Corp[1], which "includes positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment in addition to profit as its legally defined goals." I'm not sure if that works in practice, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

I find it even good for medical conditions, condensed history of major events, understanding geography and biography of actors, sportspersons and politicians.

Actually, isn't it the * best * first website to learn about anything?

I find learning mathematical concepts from Wikipedia very difficult

Have you tried simple Wikipedia? I find it way easier to conceptualization the topics there and then move onto the main Wikipedia to get more detail, as needed.

I also agree, and would further that any relatively technically involved concept tends to contain the most complicated form of that topic, for example the wikipedia page on lift goes into some pretty intense detail.

This is the natural result for a website written by users (those with lots of knowledge write it for others who have lots of knowledge). Even simple wikipedia is not immune to this, due to explaining the concept theoretically instead of taking example problems.

I do not mean to say that I think wikipedia is bad or that others do better. I'm not even sure such a problem is solvable at all (making it useful for both beginners and experts)

On the other hand, articles written by experts with full detail is much more useful to those already well versed in a given field. To use myself as an example: I would look elsewhere for computing or linguistics information if the articles were all written for beginners.

I don't disagree with you - the articles are not at all useless in topics for which I am well versed. Like I say, the issue that is perhaps unsolvable is some intuative way to have the article useful to everyone at once while not bogging them down in useless info

You should check out simple wikipedia, there's not a page for everything but there's quite a bit. Here's an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(mathematics)

I never knew Simple English wikipedia was even a thing. Thank you! Will definitely be passing it on to my immigrant parents.

It's not the best resource for learning but Wikipedia is an excellent reference for a lot of topics in mathematics.

Some topics have excellent coverage, others are barely touched so ymmv.

That's all true. I'm making a stronger claim. I believe Wikipedia is the best website for the two things I mentioned. There isn't a second competitor that comes even close to the breadth, depth and convenience provided by Wikipedia.

And all of that thanks to its painstaking manual curation which is interesting in the current context of automating everything.

Please don't try to learn about controversial political topics there. The amount of editorial wars going on is stuggering - and the worst of it, you won't be able to tell when you're looking at a propaganda piece instead of an objective article because you need prior knowledge for that, and Wikipedia is exactly the place where people get their prior knowledge.

It’s usually insanely obvious, really.

I trust Wikipedia for basic historical information, biographies etc. I feel sad that encylopedias and their peer reviews have been obliterated as a definitive source of knowledge and replaced by something which has a questionable editorial model. I use Wikipedia a lot but don't see it as a 'gold standard' of verified information. It seems a lot people do... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-...

The editorial model seems to work pretty well for things which aren't controversial, and unlike old-style encyclopedias, you can see the edits made and the discussions behind them. With Britannica, you basically just had to trust them.

The same is true for non-Wikipedia sources too, right? If you learn about political topics from, say, a newspaper article, you will not be able to tell if you're looking at a propaganda piece because the newspaper is exactly where you get your prior knowledge.

I think there's a difference: you know that newspaper won't offer you an objective prior knowledge. But with Wikipedia, too many people have such assumption.

> I find it even good for medical conditions

As in you read several books about a medical condition, and then see what Wikipedia says about it? Because if you just start by reading the Wikipedia article, you'd have no idea whether it's wrong or not. (It's usually wrong.)

Is it? Why on earth don't you fix it when you see that? You don't even need an account, if that's what your worried about.

I'm surprised at the idea though, and pretty skeptical that it's actually the case since I would have assumed many others with medical knowledge would also have noticed, and one of them would have corrected things eventually.

Well, popular sports tournaments. Not all of them have current information.

I know right! My kickball league isn't on there.

Seconding sports tournaments. The World Cup has been much easier to follow on Wikipedia, often in real time, than FIFA's own site.

I strongly disagree about current events. The Merrick Garland wikipedia page was a mess immediately after he was nominated, and I've just checked and the word "unprecedented" appears 7 times, in spite of the fact that it is by-no-means unprecedented for the senate to not consider a nomination [1]. There are a lot of partisan editors that wish to astroturf for their own political convictions, and because Wikipedia articles are generally so nonpartisan after they've had some time to mature, I think it's especially problematic because readers don't realize that a fast-moving article is nowhere near up to standards.

[1]: "During the 1852 campaign between Democrat Franklin Pierce and Whig Winfield Scott, Justice John McKinley died in July. President Millard Fillmore, a Whig who was not running for reelection, nominated three candidates — one in August, one in January and one in February. The Democratic-controlled Senate took no action on two candidates and the third withdrew after the Senate postponed a vote until after inauguration. One of Fillmore’s nominations was never even considered by the Senate, while the other was simply tabled." from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/...

Unprecedented in recent history. There really should be a law that the Senate needs to start holding hearings within X days. Otherwise partisanship will creep up on either side or multiple sides if we ever move beyond two parties.

> Unprecedented in recent history. There really should be a law that the Senate needs to start holding hearings within X days. Otherwise partisanship will creep up on either side or multiple sides if we ever move beyond two parties.

Similar to a pocket veto, not acting upon a nomination is a form of action. It's an indirect mechanism to reject a nominee.

I'm pretty sure changing this to mandate a hearing within a fixed number of days would require a constitutional amendment, not just a regular law, so is essentially impossible.

And it's an unintentional power that should be restricted in the minds of many.

A pocket veto has a built in time limit. So it's not at all similar.

"Unprecedented" means "never done or known before", and "never" means "at no time in the past or future; on no occasion; not ever."

"Unprecedented in recent history" is misleading sensationalism.

In the time it took you to write out this comment you could have edited the Merrick Garland Wikipedia page to your satisfaction.

It'd have gotten reverted within 5 minutes. Wikipedia is an absolute dumpster fire for any sort of controversial topic for this exact reason.

If you want changes to stick to a highly visited page like Merrick Garland then you need to either:

1. Craft an essay on the Talk page explaining why your modifications are well sourced and should not be changed

2. Camp the page for modifications

Both of which require much more time than it took to write OP's comment above.

Politics is amongst the most contested areas. At least the disputes are visible, rather than hidden from view as with most media.

True. When I was starting out, I was tasked with editing the Wikipedia page of one of our clients to add more information. Wasn't anything sinister; the company just wanted to ensure the page had up to date information.

When I ventured to the 'Talk' page, I was surprised to see so many edits and comments from editors.

This was for a little known company in a niche field with little traffic or chance to profit. Yet the editors were as diligent as ever.

+1. I have felt this as well. I personally consider the "Lock" icon as a sign that the article is controversial and then I am extra skeptical about it. Might be a good idea for Wikipedia to highlight controversial articles prominently using some other iconography like big bold text telling that the current article is under rapid contradictory edits, or even highlight parts of the text that have been recently edited multiple times and therefore are likely to be controversial.

There's a special portal for current events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events.

I would add:

3. Car Model history

crazy the amount of information available on wiki around automobiles/auto programs (DARPA, etc)

> with basically no ads, extremely good formatting (relevant tables, charts etc.), and relatively unbiased.

these are qualities of a low entropy system.

> barely a week old

Heck, I remember the day the news broke, I thought "Wow, so many news articles on this... let me just head to Wikipedia and see the consensus.

The news had broken just hours beforehand, and already Wikipedia had all the info and a creative-commons graphic of a map of the cave.

The downside is that in a few years, most of those references will be 404.

The upside is that we can still edit them all anytime :)

Yet there are still people claiming the site is not good for anything. Of course, you shouldn't base your phd paper on it, but I'll use it for any information first checkpoint, all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com