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Comment by klntsky | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia as an encyclopedia project is a complete failure. It fails to deliver a consistent representatiuon of reality. The basic premise that if there is an open discussion, inconsistencies can eventually be resolved, is false. Not to mention it's openness gives all sorts of attackers an easy target.

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> It fails to deliver a consistent representatiuon of reality.

I'm curious by what precisely you mean by this. Last I checked, reality itself has problems consistently representing itself.

I mean articles not contradicting each other.

> reality itself has problems consistently representing itself

In this case neutral statements could be used.

I don't think eliminating contradictions matters that much. Wikipedia is a good starting point for reading up on topics that matter to you and then doing your own research, and a nice website to kill a few hours reading about topics that don't. Even with contradictions it works fine for both use cases.

It isn't a good encyclopedia, I agree – but what is?

The "historical Jesus" one is the funniest entry to me, it conveniently ommits who his "historical father" is, and pretends multiple sources are talking about the same person even if they don't agree in the most basic details, imagine that with any other Wikipedia bigraphic entry: "The Hitler I'm talking about commited no genocide and didn't believe in eugenics, but let's all pretend we are still talking about the same person, for the sake of peace among the discussers".

I'm quite puzzled by this comment. A quick glance through the article and there seem to be several references to what appear to be serious academic work.

So is the issue with the work of the academics? Or the way Wikipedia has put together the article? I'm not a historian by any definition of the word and in quite curious about this.

The funny is in how the religious overtone of the subject collides with the usual science-ish manner of wikipedia editors.

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