Hacker News Reader

Comment by kops | Hacker News Reader

I look at wikipedia as a cafe where intellectuals come and chat.

Do I want to continue listening to this chatter? Hell Yes. Nothing else comes even close in terms accessibility.

Will I stake my life on the information taken from wikipedia? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even cite it as a reference anywhere.

View on HN

If intellectuals were the only people chatting on Wikipedia, I would like Wikipedia even better than I like Hacker News.

I like Wikipedia 100x better than Hacker News. 50% of the chatter here is robots repeating: logical fallacy, citation needed, not science, anecdote detected!, over and over. Like broken clocks, they may be right sometimes; but that is far from my idea of intellectual. 30% is short comments that don't add much, like this one. (Notably, that's up from 1% about 4 years ago.) I'm only here for the last 20% or so.

Same here. HN still requires some energy on my part to parse the information as there is a significant amount of noise on account of self promotion/PR. On wikipedia my hit rate is almost 100%. I usually get what I want...

Surrounding yourself selectively with intellectuals, is a luxury only super rich can afford(or can they?). I can live with a little bit of bias, PR or bullshit here and there. Of course, I assume, probably incorrectly, that I can tell the difference ;-)

There are generally two types of "editors" on wiki. The talent who contribute content, and the bureaucrats who do administration. Some of first type are intellectuals, and most all the latter are anything but.

Much of the internal conflict within wiki exist because the power rests with the bureaucrats but they often lack the domain expertise to appreciate much less write the material people come to the site for. So whenever there's contention over content, it quickly turns into contention over people, and it's not hard to figure out who wins in such a conflict.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com