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Comment by pilgrimfff | Hacker News Reader

I saw a solid video a couple days ago called "Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)" https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8

I'd never given Wikipedia much thought, but it raised some very interesting points to think about.

TLDR: Despite mediocre information, Wikipedia's ubiquity has supplanted the market for better sites dedicated to specific topics.

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The "Why I hate Wikipedia" video was made by YouTuber and journalist J. J. McCullough. You wanna see something funny? This discussion is from 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

The J. J. McCullough biography was created and deleted a total of five times on Wikipedia (with two different spellings of J.J.):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

Each time it was deleted for "lack of notability". I believe he may not be telling the whole story in that video.

Apart from that, his criticisms are quite valid, if not exactly new. The video was discussed here the other day, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755

I’ll have to watch the video later to see how good their argument is… but I don’t but it.

“The market” has seemingly deemed low value SEO spam to be what’s valuable. If Wikipedia didn’t exist, I imagine the alternative would more likely be garbage rather than quality.

In this case, "the market" is essentially just Google - who incidentally created the market for SEO spam.

I don't necessarily blame Google for the tight integration with Wikipedia. It's much easier to deal with one site than many.

I think it's disingenuous to blame "the market" for what's essentially the decision of a monopoly.

Did the government grant Google a monopoly?

This is a market outcome. Perfect competition is not the natural state of the market, even though free marketers prefer to hand wave it into existence.

The government is absolutely granting Google a monopoly today. They own the browser, your email, and search. If antitrust had any teeth in this era the company would have been nuked a decade ago if not even sooner.

Antitrust is government intervention into the market. Not enforcing antitrust is not granting a monopoly.

Don’t get me wrong, antitrust is good! Government intervention is necessary. But lasseiz-fares does not mean what you appear to think it means.

When a corporation has an obvious monopoly and the government does not intervene, they are signalling the status quo is allowed to continue

Yes, except that is not a market outcome, that is government intervention into the market.

That is substantively different from a government granted monopoly, wherein it is illegal to create a competing business.

The point is that monopolies are a natural market outcome, and are what created Google. Does Google continue to exist as it is because the government has chosen not to do anything? Yes. Welcome to the free market.

Google was not really created by a natural market outcome when you consider what it takes to be a large multinational corporation operating out of the US. Any time a policy decision is made that can benefit either the larger or more politically connected stakeholder versus the smaller stakeholder, guess who gets the short end of the stick almost every time in practice. It's not the big guy. Google is open about this, they have a political action committee, they have a website page where they open with "At Google, we believe it is important to have a voice in the political process..." (1). To suggest that they don't use these mechanisms to better their own position in this market you allege to be free is naive.

https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency/

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755

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