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Comment by roystonvassey | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 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.

> 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.

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