Can you say in all honesty that a read of the Wikipedia article for DNA would have been less helpful? It's less convenient perhaps, but definitely more authoritative.
A particularly bad example is higher maths - a wiki pages on a complex mathematics topic often reads like "A gruncheon is a worch in the brashation of plusters" and each of these words is a separate page or topic. Of course, you _can_ in theory 'just' click through all the tree of linked pages to understand a concept ...
For DNA the page (scanning it now) is well laid out, with images (including a spinning Rasmol? image) and lots of detail. However, the detail could be a drag on understanding for some : There are 'nucleotides' and 'nucleosides' and 'nucleobases'? There are non-canonical bases? Supercoiling? Z-DNA? While I know (most) of these things, it is because I've learned about them in other contexts, or by direct instruction.
I'm not saying it is impossible to understand DNA from that page, but it is likely to be harder (for some?) than a more conversational approach to learning.
I just asked Opus to "explain DNA to me in simple language" and the two are not even in the same league in terms of quality.
I mean - it is certainly better ... but it is still a lot of stuff. For example:
> Part of an organism's DNA is "non-coding DNA" sequences. They do not code for protein sequences. Some noncoding DNA is transcribed into non-coding RNA molecules, such as transfer RNA, ribosomal RNA, and regulatory RNAs.
Do you _need_ to know about tRNA, rRNA, and operons (?) to understand DNA? The thing about an encyclopedia/wiki entry is that it has to cover the whole topic. This is a strength for reference, as you can scan it and find the bit you need. For learning from scratch, I can see that a conversational approach (with a human or LLM) has advantages where the learner can direct the level of detail and path through the material.
Ultimately, both are worthwhile, but I can also see the strengths/weaknesses of both ways to learn.
That can help a bit.
I am studying for a Masters degree in Computer Science with AI and the lecture notes are like Wikipedia sometimes. Incomplete, perhaps assume pre-knowledge that lots of Masters students won't have. All of these I have taken to ChatGPT and got great explanations, diagrams, graphs etc.