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Comment by brianwillis | Hacker News Reader

Not really a start up, but I thought Wikipedia was an extraordinarily dumb idea at first. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit - what could possibly go wrong?

I completely missed the value of having decent moderator tools (which no site had back in the early 2000's), and a passionate group of moderators who cared very deeply about the integrity of the site.

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There have been a lot of startups over the past decade centred around the sharing economy that have helped to prove that humans can be civil in these situations where one might think that we would default to nefarious activity - Airbnb, Local Motion, etc. to name a few.

Humanity is continuing to prove itself as capable of dealing with each other harmoniously and we are seeing great businesses emerge that are benefitting the masses as a result.

If you think Wikipedia is civil, I recommend looking at the talk pages for contentious articles. It's overwhelmingly full of pedantic bickering and passive aggressiveness. It also suffers from a lot of bias in articles where there's a vocal minority on the internet willing to spend hundreds of hours militantly editing and moderating. It's essentially a shouting match on the internet with the loudest group winning.

Even worse are the articles on subjects which few people other than a couple of authors actually care about at all (notably English language articles on political issues in non-English speaking countries and fringe issues which aren't quite fringe enough to get their pages deleted) There's no argument taking place, but that's why the content is so bad. A couple of UK politicians editing their articles hit the headlines in the election buildup, but I found an article on a more obscure MP which was almost entirely, and very openly and honestly, written by the politicians' partner.

Wikipedia is more successful than most people could have imagined in generating quantity, and better than most would have thought in suppressing outright vandalism, but quality is far behind what people are lead to believe from rather superficial studies comparing heavily-trafficked pages against only slightly better-written and more outdated conventional encyclopedias. But there was a time when encyclopedias were expected to be authoritative, as opposed to where Wikipedia has excelled, which is regularly being the first remotely useful result in Google.

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