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Comment by lblume | Hacker News Reader

Could you give concrete examples of obviously misleading articles? Maybe depends on perspective, but I would consider most articles I found to be at the very least to be acceptable. My new tab page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random, so I engage with the content a lot.

I also think that with CS and similar articles, it boils down to the learning type of the person in question. I can personally grasp new concepts very well through articles just because of the linked structure, that if I don't yet know something, I can just click on it and create a connection.

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A friend of mine, Cambridge graduate, a day or two ago needed to read about normalization.

We looked at the Wiki page.

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

A huge page, and for someone who doesn't know what normalization is, totally and utterly useless in every possible way.

Hell, I've been using computers since I was a child, read the Date book, wrote my own relational database from scratch, and I don't know what some of the stuff on that page means. Explaining everything in terms which themselves need explanation is not useful, and it is the absolute hallmark of science wikipedia articles.

So what I would say is this : you can't learn from Wikipedia articles. They do not teach. Which makes me question their value. What are they for?

Looking at the database article, I now realize that many of the math and physics articles are written in exactly that style. The authors seem to give complete and thorough maximally-formal definitions first, and only afterwards (if at all) attempt to explain it to people that don't already know the subject.

Thinking about it, this is exactly what I would expect from a process that overemphasizes formal rules of evidence and precision over being of value to the general public.

There are various bits of history where I'm reasonably well read, and one is the Vietnam War.

The Wiki page is here;

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

To my eye, it presents a wholly and utterly misleading picture of events.

The Vietnamese simply wanted independence, because they were sick of the brutality of French rule. Everything that happened after came from the French not wanting to go away, and hood-winking the Americans into supporting them, and then the French went away anyway, and left the Americans carrying the can.

A lot of that seems covered in the article about the First Indochina War which is linked to in the first sentence of the article on the Vietnam War.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Indochina_War

Do you perhaps consider them part of the same longer war? It's hard to break continuous history into neat article chunks.

A lot of the theoretical linguistics articles are quite bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determiner_phrase#Arguments_fo... is full of bizarre arguments that don't make sense in the tradition that postulated the DP hypothesis. Not only that, but the trees are written in a really bizarre way for a topic in generative grammar.

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