Seeking Advice: Interested in Reading Entire Wikipedia – Where to Start? | Hacker News Reader

Seeking Advice: Interested in Reading Entire Wikipedia – Where to Start?

7 pointsmrbear0116 comments

Hello HN Community, I've set myself an intriguing, albeit challenging task: reading the entirety of Wikipedia. The wealth of knowledge and insights it offers is immense, and I'm genuinely interested in digging deep into this vast ocean of information. Although this is non-traditional reading, I was wondering if anyone here, possibly with a similar experience or relevant insight, could guide me on where to start? Any specific strategies, categories, or systematic approaches that would aid in creating a 'roadmap' through such an expanse of knowledge? I understand the dynamic nature of Wikipedia and that it keeps evolving, but I'm sure there's a method to this madness. I'm currently contemplating a chronological approach (history -> present), or a categorical one, but am open to other ideas. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks in advance!

View on HN

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

If we say it is about 7 million pages and you plan to do this in about 3 years (say 1000 days) you need to read 7000 pages a day, if you worked in this 7 hours a day you’d have to read 1000 pages an hour or almost 20 pages per minute. You could definitely scan a wikipedia page and get something in 3 seconds but you would not be reading deeply.

If you took 30 years and only read 10% of the articles, now you get about 5 minutes per article.

If you want to get some overview of what is in Wikipedia consider

https://www.dbpedia.org/

and

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

As others mentioned, reading everything is just not possible.

The way I would do it:

1. Use the random wikipedia article button [0]

2. Read the articles and keep track which ones you've read

3. If you find an article/topic interesting stop there and go to the referenced articles in that article and basically go down a rabbit hole

4. If you had enough of that topic, go back to 1.

[0] can be found in the top left hamburger menu which leads to this special link, that will automatically redirect to a random article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Doesn't the traditional Henry Wallace Mills method work for you?

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7471/7471-h/7471-h.htm#link2...

On a less ambitious scale: There is a book about someone who read through the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. It’s titled “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World,” written by A.J. Jacobs. In this book, Jacobs chronicles his experience of reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z, sharing the knowledge he gained, the quirky facts he learned, and how this quest affected his life and relationships. The book is a blend of humor, trivia, and personal reflection, making it an entertaining read for those of us interested in knowledge and learning.

Immediately thought of this book, thanks for the reminder. His others are fun, too.

Wikipedia is a mile wide and an inch deep, especially as you get to the more obscure topics.

I instead recommend picking up a complete encyclopedia set like the Britannica. You'll learn more and the information will be far more trustworthy.

Cite?

What does "cite?" mean? Citation, as in you want a citation for this?

Wikipedia is a community-operated website that is directly manipulated by people that have real-world incentives for doing so. It's not inaccurate, per se, but commits a lot of "censorship by omission."

Britannica or another academic encyclopedia is written by professional academics that specialize in their field.

It's honestly a bit scary to me that people think Wikipedia is the be all and end all for information on a subject. There is a lot of information out there that isn't remotely mentioned on Wikipedia.

Sorry, it's just a shorthand (often used on Wikipedia and online forums) for requesting a citation from some respected source that backs up a claim.

A lot of studies have been done comparing Wikipedia to other encyclopedias, and it doesn't seem to me like it's broadly worse or better, but often comparable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#%3A%7...

If you have a source suggesting otherwise, could you please share it? If it's just your opinion or anecdotal experience, that's perfectly fine too. I was just curious, as someone who thought this debate was long settled (but apparently not!)

-------

Edit: You edited your comment as I was posting. To address your second point about bias and omission, yes, absolutely that happens there. I've had that happen to my own edits there too, when some power hungry admin refused to allow an edit about a topic because it contradicted their personal political views.

But I'd still sooner trust a real time encyclopedia that by and large anyone can edit than one maintained by a tiny group of people from the same cultural background.

Wikipedia is a good starting place for learning about a topic from different perspectives. It's not the final stop, just the start. Its references are often good next steps.

I honestly didn't realize Britannica was still around, but if there's some objective measure of its quality vs Wikipedia that suggests it's worth it, I'd love to see it.

My source is picking up a physical encyclopedia and realizing that it's far less biased and far more comprehensive than Wikipedia. And the experience of knowing much about a topic and reading a Wikipedia article that's obviously biased and written from a particular contemporary 21st century viewpoint.

Wikipedia's obsession with "respected sources" is a part of its problem. Instead of evaluating claims independently, it offloads that responsibility to organizations that are known to have made mistakes. This is basic epistemological problem and one that Wikipedia doesn't seem to care about solving. It's honestly laughable to me that people can look at this list and call some of these reliable sources:

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

Beyond that, I have never seen any of these studies explicitly analyze omission as the key differentiator. As I said above, this is really the fundamental problem with Wikipedia. It doesn't aim to be comprehensive and cover all potential aspects and opinions on an issue, it aims to push a certain worldview and dismiss or ignore other ones.

This is perhaps not surprising, as every source of information is going to be biased, but I have to push back on the frequent insistence that Wikipedia is somehow neutral or beyond these criticisms.

I rather like the model of "encyclopedia as a collection of viewpoints" rather than "arbiter of truthiness", personally. Wikipedia tries (though sometimes fails) to show the controversies in a field.

Many of the studies in that list explicitly mention omissions, actually.

Nobody claims that Wikipedia is without bias or perfectly comprehensive, just that on average it doesn't seem to be much better or worse than Britannica and similar.

That's been my personal experience too, as someone who grew up with Britannica, World Book, Encarta, and later Wikipedia. Britannica was written in heavier prose, but I don't remember any of them to be especially better than any other, except that Wikipedia had a lot more coverage of topics that would've never made it into a print encyclopedia.

But anyway, I understand your point, even if I haven't experienced it myself. I thought they stopped publishing Britannica. If it's still around, I'll have to check out a copy the next time I'm in a library (while those themselves still exist, lol).

----

Edit: It looks like the print version stopped in 2010, 14 years ago? A lot has changed since then.

They still have an online version though. Is that what you're referring to, or do you think even the 14 year old print version is better than Wikipedia?

It doesn't need to be Britannica specifically, just any encyclopedia that isn't subject to the demands of the present. Wikipedia is modified constantly because it's politically relevant on a day-to-day basis.

Older books aren't necessarily always more objective, but they tend to have different viewpoints – and being made of paper, the text can't be changed when politically expedient.

So if possible, I always recommend people read as wide a selection of information as possible, and maybe my initial suggestion of a specific paper encyclopedia was not actually the best one, and a varied selection of different ones from different eras would actually be better.

My basic point is just that Wikipedia is very biased on certain topics and thus treating it as a sacred, complete repository of knowledge to read is not a good idea.

No disagreement there! If I find a topic interesting enough, I'll start with Wikipedia and then usually buy or borrow some books on the topic for detailed study. On more than one occasion, I've then returned to Wikipedia to update it with information from those books. But yeah, definitely it shouldn't be the sole source people use.

https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/spoon-river-anthology/28-fr...

...Yet at the start there was a clear vision,

A high and urgent purpose in my soul

Which drove me on trying to memorize

The Encyclopedia Britannica!

You can't read it all.

Pick the top N articles and read those.

I really don't understand how you think you can read an encyclopedia chronologically.

You'll get far more value out of reading academic books in topics you're interested in.

Wikipedia is good for brief, quick summaries. But to actually understand a topic in depth it's the easy way out. You need to put the work in and read real books.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com