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Comment by MattyRad | Hacker News Reader

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MattyRad

Wikipedia is the perfect contrast to google search results.

- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful related links if you need more information.

- Pages are organized and brutalist.

- Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free.

Contrast this to Google:

- 50-100% noise (depending on the query; more information requires more queries and therefore less signal)

- SERP pages are disorganized and absolutely riddled with UX dark patterns (modals, banners, autoplaying video, etc). Many pages with good info are over-styled/over-javascripted/over-languaged, and finding the one or two sentences you're looking for is a chore.

- One-off SEO spam plagues everything; ads and affiliate links are pervasive. Stewardship is a waste of time.

View on HN

As people turn to Wikipedia for information the same momentum that ruined Google is sure to follow. It's already happened to Wikipedia pages that even tangentially touch anything political. If you go on the talk pages you see a slow motion battle between good faith editors that want an encyclopedia of information with a neutral tone, vs bad faith editors that want to use Wikipedia to represent their idealogical narrative. It's even spilled over into historical pages that don't carry the "correct" judgement on the past.

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-na...

>- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful related links if you need more information.

This is not true anymore. From Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger:

>Wikipedia Is Badly Biased

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

It's completely untrustworthy on anything remotely political. Very, very mainstream narrative compliant/reinforcing.

- Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free

And many of them inject their personal biases.

For hard science stuff, math, and celebrities, it's pretty trustworthy but as I said, anything remotely politicized will always have the same slant.

A bunch of people claim "heavy slant", but considering how Wikipedia requires citing sources, I have strong doubts about the severity.

Is the complaint here really that some political narratives don't like being reminded what they have said or promised?

It's probably worth noting that Wikipedia breaks character occasionally and does the banner panhandling, intentionally nosediving UX to put an ad front-and-center.

This is the behavior that should be penalized by search engines- however difficult it is to quantify. Wikipedia is some of the highest quality info on the internet, so they should be able to afford the penalty themselves.

> It's probably worth noting that Wikipedia breaks character occasionally and does the banner panhandling, intentionally nosediving UX to put an ad front-and-center.

They are asking for donations to fund their best-in-kind free project. I know ads aren't popular on HN but if you don't want ads, and you don't want a donation banner, how do you expect sites to be funded?

Wikipedia's expenses go up year after year seemingly needlessly. It is making revenues far and above what it needs to maintain the project, but its expenses seem to go up each year anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER

Wikipedia pages are not "owned" by anyone other than the editors' community as a whole.

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