Wikipedia sucks

Wikipedia has many, many issues, but the reasons you provide aren't their real problem. Wikipedia provides most of the information needed for free and unfettered dissemination and distribution. This is not something that Encarta could ever claim. A lot of the media on Encarta is licensed and costs lots of money to publish, assuming you can get the publishers permission to do so.

No, Wikipedia's issues are, sadly for me, abuse of admin power, an inability to deal with trolls or people like Giano (who are experts in their field but don't play nicely with others) and a lack of enforcement of core site policies.

This, unfortunately, infects the project and causes problems with the actual content. There are many, many more folks who want to participate the in the admins notice board than there are those who want to work on articles. As the person who actually came up with the idea of the admission notice board and who started it, that makes me very sad.

Linkbait title.

TLDR: Wikipedia needs more images, videos etc. In a bid to rile up emotion he compares wikipedia unfavourably to an ancient version of encarta.

AFAIK: there are no technical restrictions on adding videos and images to the pages. The reason there aren't more videos/images etc is because of copyright concerns. It just isn't that easy still to find images/videos with clear copyright.

Since text is literally created by the authors, wikipedia automatically assigns themselves the right to use the text you type in on.

I wonder how much information Encarta had on the Pitjantjatjara language(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitjantjatjara_language) or evolutionary approaches to depression(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depr...)? I imagine fuck all.

How much does video add to your understanding of a subject? I don't imagine people who watch the History Channel would have a comparable understanding to those who read about similar topics through Wikipedia. Video is often just a distraction.

Unrelated to the topic at hand, but who else here on HN actually contributes to Wikipedia? Lots of technical articles in the algorithms & data structures field are very lacking, and you aren't likely to encounter the much-discussed editor drama wars there.

I myself have started expanding the articles on string search algorithms, and have found it is a great way to incentivize learning things while also contributing meaningfully to society.

Yes Wikipedia does suck but not for the reasons outlined. When Encarta started out everything was on Encarta. You need to remember not many people had internet at home in 1997.

If you want to read about the space shuttle try clicking through to the NASA site. They have videos. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

It's a reasonably sensible point being made when I expected the title to mean I was about to be subjected to yet another rant about editors.

Improving the interactivity of wikipedia would be nice. Although I suspect it would make it harder to edit which might be worse than the benefits.

I disagree. Wikipedia is about the idea of free knowledge. This means supporting the growing number of old devices passed to third world countries. As a NP relying on user contributions I think the work is amazing.