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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> Wikipedia is one of the few web information sources that are globally accepted as more or less correct.

Not even Wikipedia claims this, which is why they tell users to never quote Wikipedia but to go to the sources (which all articles are supposed to have) and quote those instead.

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Except for those times what is cited is a scientific journal behind a paywall. You can’t really quote those unless you pay up.

Then there’s the whole “WikiGate” (terrible name, but whatever) where Elsevier gave free accounts to Wikipedia editors[1]. That doesn’t help.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/09/wikigate-raises-ques...

Sci-Hub is pretty amazing for any paper that has been out for as long as most sources on Wikipedia have been, so in truth you can almost always read them in full.

Never finds the stuff I search :/

You should try with Library Genesis first. Both projects cooperate (so if LG doesn't have something, it gets added when downloaded from SH, and SH gives you a link from LG when it's already on their DB), but I find the LibGen search engine to be far more powerful, throwing me the article I need when SH can't.

Really? Do you search by doi number?

It’s a direct proxy to university databases - it should have almost everything.

That's not a "Wikipedia" thing though...that's standard practice with any encyclopedia.

Britannica has been recommended to me many times, by academics, as a source of basic facts - it doesn't contain in-depth research, of course, but they considered it to be reliable.

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