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Comment by FirstLvR | Hacker News Reader

i've said this everywhere... we all need to invest on wikipedia, to make it powerful, free and useful

it may not work as intented, if you are doing university research but ... for general purpose we must have a general encyclopedia that actually works

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Huh, Wikipedia is already free and useful?

Anyway, Wikipedia raises TONS of money but it goes to staff of dubious purpose with regards to its goals.

Same with most non-profits.

Not going to happen so long as self-appointed kings decide what gets to stay. Exhaustive list of Pokemon? Sure thing. "Non-notable" programming language? Not worthy.

Yep, I see so many pages get deleted due to "non-notability". Meanwhile you see exhaustive content about temporarily-popular subjects like a complete plot synopsis for an entire TV series, plus detailed information about every location ever described in that series. Like this comprehensive list of all the characters in the ReBoot series[0]. Hey, I liked the series at the time, but come on. I can't help but feel a bit frustrated when valuable information is deleted permanently, but content hundreds of times the size persists for super-obscure topics that a couple people feel passionate about enough to fight for and rally their fellow account-holders to vote for.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ReBoot_characters

There should be a flag indicating that content is considered 'Not Notable' by the admins so it is easy to ignore in searches if you so desire.

The idea that content is actually being deleted because it isn't considered 'notable' by some person in 2020 is sad. Who knows what will be considered 'notable' in 2050?

Equally, everything on bulbapedia was within the scope of the project initially, so stats of Pokémon in each gen are now feeling excluded, just as programming languages are. This piece is pretty good on the topic: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

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