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Comment by byecomputer | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia hasn't been tainted like everything else. I can spend all night reading Wikipedia, and it's way more interesting than most content online. All they do is ask me for $3 every once in a while, and while I'm actually really poor... I still gave 'em $3 out of my cigarette money. I would've never had the confidence to go back to school if that resource wasn't there (or even had the realization that I love learning), but I also wouldnt wake up in the afternoon to see stuff in my browser history like "7:03 AM: Polar Bear Jail", so it's a trade-off. Beats YouTube, though

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Linkified, for the other aficionados of ursus maritimus out there:

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

PS: You might enjoy Veritasium (a YouTuber).

Perhaps not aficionados... polar bear jail is a complicated solution to a polar bear problem. The ethics of their incarceration is left as an exercise to the reader

Yeah, I can bounce from one thing to another there just soaking up info for hours.

After all these years of doing that I finally visited the Wikipedia Home page a few weeks ago. I was quite surprised with all the stuff they have there that I had no idea about. That rabbit hole is a lot bigger than I knew about.

I remember reading that by following hyperlinks in Wikipedia articles, all Wikipedia pages can be indirectly linked back to the page for "Psychology".

My dad's house is on Wikipedia, and we didn't find out until half a decade after he'd bought it. Reason being it's on the historical register, nothing spooky. But, boy, was I jazzed to see a picture of the house I was sitting in with a little map under it on Wikipedia. I felt so documented.

>Wikipedia hasn't been tainted like everything else.

The illusion of purity allows corruption to thrive. There are influence teams hired by VIPs who use Wikipedia as simply an extension of cable news/social media. To "get out in front of stories", or if they're late to the game, to scrub/"memoryhole" undesired ones. Wikipedia editing as an amusing hobby for niche nerds is an outdated concept for many topics.

Wikipedia is far too powerful a Persuasion tool to let fail. Its essay-long donation plea's are designed to garner credibility towards innocence. How nefarious could the site be? They're scrounging around for scraps each year!

I think it's understood that controversial topics and current events on Wikipedia are subject to manipulation. But I don't think TPTB are committing payroll to influence my opinion of "Ben Franklin" or "Norwegian Forest cat" or "semipermeable membrane".

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