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That's what I miss the most from pre-Web 2.0 Internet, the Geocities era: there were a lot of small and manually curated sites (as opposed to news aggregators and SEO spam sites) on any kind of topic.

Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but the vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real depth and passion in it.

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  > Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but
  > the vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real
  > depth and passion in it.

I love these personally curated pages. But lets be honest, the wikipedia page has more information about the conveyer belts listed and it has links to references, e.g. the ADB grant for the belt in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conveyor_belt#Long_belt_convey...

One area where the personally curated sites continues to thrive is the time-nuts folks. If you have the slightest interest in all things metrology you can lose hours reading about anything from time measurement gear and GPSDOs to policy decisions regarding deccoupling civil time from the earth's rotation. Definitely worth checking out if you have some spare time:

  - http://www.leapSecond.com (Tom Van Baak)
  - http://www.niceties.com/time.html (Doug Hogarth)
  - http://prc68.com/I/timefreq.shtml (Brooke Clarke)
  - http://www.febo.com/time-freq (John Ackermann)
  - http://www.rt66.com/~shera (Brooks Shera)
  - http://www.qsl.net/zl1bpu/PRECISION (Murry Greenman)
  - http://www.thegleam.com/ke5fx (John Miles)
  - http://www.ko4bb.com/Timing (Didier Juges)

In addition to a fondness for Ham Radio call signs time-nuts also keep up with HTML5;) HTML5 graph of US Western Power Grid deviation from 60 HZ: http://wa6rzw.homelinux.net/addon/grid/gauge/hertz.html

> Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but the vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real depth and passion in it.

Mostly because the Wikipedians won't even allow it (whether due to a lack of references or because it's not "relevant-" or "notable-enough") in the first place.

And for a good reason: your grandfather's recollection of WWII, for example, has no place in an encyclopedia, but it's surely more interesting and possibly instructive than reading about it from a history book. I'm saddened we're losing this.

It doesn't have a place in an encyclopedia, for sure, but I posit that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It was supposed to be, and ostensibly started as one, but the amount of content that gets placed into it (and then removed by the mods...) shows that a sizable amount of Wikipedia users use it as a "knowledge repository" instead, which I think is subtly different.

I mean, I wish we could collate the entire set of human knowledge into one place, however Wikipedia says that it doesn't want to be that place. The thing is, when you've already got 100,000 word treatises on Sailor Moon due to some Admin/Mod having that as his/her pet topic, it smacks of elitism, favoritism and hypocrisy.

Wikipedia is rather disappointing, particularly on engineering and math topics.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-Man_(2012_f...

What more is there to say about conveyor belts?

It shouldn't be surprising that a major motion picture would have a detailed page written.

A problem is that it's not necessarily more accurate. What Wikipedia wants to be, and which I think is valuable (though it's not the only valuable thing) is a summary of the best published information on any given subject, with references to that published information backing it up. So if I read a Wikipedia article on, say, Treblinka, I expect to get a summary of what historians think happened there, with references to where they say so. Where they don't agree or are unsure, I'd like a neutral explanation of any significant areas of uncertainty or historiographical dispute (with citations to the relevant sides), etc. I really don't expect to get a personal recollection by one Wikipedia editor's grandfather of what happened there... especially if that recollection contains information that isn't consistent with what's written in the mainstream histories.

It's possible that the recollection may sometimes actually be better than the mainstream histories, though in such a well-studied subject as WW2 concentration camps I think the odds are fairly low. But in either case I think that's a job for someone other than Wikipedia: Wikipedia's job is to summarize the current historical understanding. Revising the current historical understanding in light of new information or arguments is a different and very large job in itself.

[citation needed]

I've found that forums seem to provide much of the knowledge previously transferred through Geocities. Detailed, human, non-encyclopedified information about almost anything is available spread through a vast quantity of subject-specific forums across the Internet rather than across webrings hosted on Geocities and the ilk.

I think part of the reason for the shift is that forums have gotten much more advanced: most include a personal homepage, photo gallery, and provisions for making "uber/FAQ" threads that easily surpass the most meticulously curated Geocities sites.

The problem is that forums aren't the ideal medium for collecting knowledge: how many times something you're looking for is buried in a 500 page topic, between non relevant, troll or deleted posts.

And for some reason every forum I've used has a useless search function: Yes, it searches, but it doesn't find or list results in a convenient way for someone who's looking for something specific.

umm... tumblr dude. geez

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