Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

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> “Wikipedia is written by a whole bunch of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. But it turns out that collectively, a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re talking about know more than one person who spent their lifetime researching it.”

This immediately brought to mind this article: http://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out. I mean it vividly popped into my brain because of the utter nonsense of this claim.

It doesn't turn out that an army of ignorants knows more than an expert. What turns out is that free trumps paid, and (perhaps surprisingly) can muster an enormous army of manpower, which in turn leads to a comprehensiveness that is unattainable by a traditional monetary business model. I mean you don't need to look very far to find factual inaccuracies and indeed slander on Wikipedia that can not be fixed because the rules are not oriented towards truth. So to draw the vacuous conclusion that Wikipedia won because its articles were better than Britannica belies a sort of willful ignorance about how the world works.

That's not say doing an end run around overly comfortable gatekeepers isn't a good thing in general, but man what a braindead quote.

There's a lot of evidence that Wikipedia's articles are actually better than Britannica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Compar...

The difference being in my mind that I won't turn to an article in Britannica and find it randomly defaced, or deliberately seeded with biased information. Wikipedia is awesome, but gotta use it as a jumping off point to find references to "real" sources for anything that _must_ be right.

Who uses Britannica after grade school? Only idiots. But people still take Wikipedia seriously after grade school. That's what's insidious about it.

Britannica articles aren't written by "one person who spent their lifetime researching" that topic.

Actually, they often are. But Wikipedia articles are written by dozens or even hundreds of people who spent a significant part of their lives researching the topic. Individually none of those people can match that Britannica expert's experience, but collectively they dwarf him.

Britannica's expert model also risks some pretty biased and incomplete articles, depending on the expert chosen. There's a relationship between being prominent in a field and being willing and able to write a comprehensive, neutral overview of the field, but it's not quite the same thing, and some top researchers are very bad at the latter.

>What turns out is that free trumps paid, and (perhaps surprisingly) can muster an enormous army of manpower, which in turn leads to a comprehensiveness that is unattainable by a traditional monetary business model

I think of this as similar to how knowledge is freely shared in a coffeehouse. You hear a conversation, chip in your insight if you have any. You do it because talking involves little effort, and you want to share your knowledge. That might be due to a variety of reasons; from trying to prove someone wrong, to a general feeling of wanting to display knowledge.

Whatever it is, it has clearly extended to Wikipedia, and Im glad for it

You do it because talking involves little effort, and you want to share your knowledge. That might be due to a variety of reasons; from trying to prove someone wrong, to a general feeling of wanting to display knowledge.

But none of those motivations require that you be, in fact, correct.

I've lost track of the times people overheard me discussing something with someone and piped in to tell me the virtues of homeopathy or how GMOs are a plot to destroy the food supply or that there's no actual proof of evolution.

I'm most skeptical of people who are least skeptical of their own knowledge and how they acquired it. Yet it seems those are the people most likely to offer an opinion.

If you (rightly) skeptical of my claims go find a newspaper and read the letters to the editor. These are people sufficiently convinced of their rightness that they took the time to send a letter or an E-mail.

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