samegreatsleeve

Britannica costs $5 a month. Their articles are excellent.

A free source written by top philosphers is Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy. That should be the first hit.

If Wikipedia wants to be a link farm with citations and links to every source on some topic, that might be an OK service. That's not what they are. They claim to be an encyclopedia. They get it 80% right, but 20% wrong is unacceptable for the world's go-to source for information. Especially when the better alternatives are just as accessible; they only lack SEO.

Understand that it isn't MY problem. I find it easy to avoid wikipedia because I know how to do things like -wikipedia.

But I'm not the vulnerable population. Most people don't know to do that, and just think wiki info is fine when it's not.

The results that give 5+ wikipedias on one search are usually long tailed.

Here's one search I just made up:

logic axioms encyclopedia

First 4 hits are wikipedia, all 4 of them are shit. If you just add -wikipedia the results are infinitely better. Therefore, wikipedia is a low quality content farm shitting up the Internet.

It also doesn't help that google, apple products and other services now directly prioritize wikipedia.

Example:

continental philosophy definition

Google first gives a big bold wikipedia box, presenting wikipedia info as if it is the fucking gospel.

Then the next hit is wikipedia.

Then the rest are a mix of reliable sites that wikipedia stole its content from, and wikipedia subsidiaries (Jimmy Wales affiliated) like Citizendium.

How is this considered ok? It's an intellectual travesty and a giant threat to public education. How many people will click the first link, or the giant google endorsed wikipedia box, and ignore all the reliable experts below it?

What does "unhealthy" in this context mean?

Aristocracy is the norm for human civilization. I don't get why people are so chicken little about it. When your citizens are disgustingly wealthy they aren't going to have trouble buying those things.

The experts aren't bing silenced, they just show up on the second page of google so get no hits.

The first page will often have literally 5+ links to wikipedia, and those articles will cite the never-visited reliable page but get a lot of the details wrong.

You're absolutely right that it's a cultural issue more so than a tech issue. Wikipedia marketing has managed to convince people that an amateur content farm should be the first stop for information. But why should your first stop be amateurs who often get it wrong?

Ask any academic how good wikipedia is for their specialty. It always ranges from "ok" to "terrible". And why would we expect anything else? How can amateurs be expected to understand, interpret, and report on reams of subtle developments in any area?

The best wikipedia articles are the ones that tend most toward plagiarism--literally just copying the words and concepts of an academic while barely rephrasing them to avoid copyright infringement. It's not worthwhile.

Meanwhile, every important article on wikipedia has a high quality, professionally written counterpart on Encyclopedia Britannica. What's the point of wikipedia?

For an easy example just search any topic in philosophy. Wikipedia comes up first. Read that, then read Stanford Encyclopedia, then read Encyclopedia Britannica.

Why is wikipedia the top hit? Because their SEO/marketing is overwhelming. It's definitely not due to quality! In contrast, the other two options being beat out by Wikipedia SEO are written by notable experts. The quality difference is enormous. EB and SEP can actually be relied on. On wikipedia you never know what important subtlety they got wrong.

Wikipedia is the eHow or expertsexchange of information. It's a drag on human knowledge. It needs to die.

So wikipedia is a low quality content farm that shows up for every google search and prevents actual expert pages from being seen--taking revenue and visibility from experts--while providing lower quality content.

And that's a good thing to you.

An unreliable encyclopedia is the most useless thing in the world. An unreliable encyclopedia with the most powerful SEO in history...is a grave threat to human knowledge.

[citation needed]

wikipedia'd!

Haha, I was thinking the same about you. If you're a troll I give you credit: you know exactly how to impersonate the stupidity of a Wikipedia true believer. Asking for citations when they're not relevant. Ironic use of logical fallacies. Substance-free ideological bandwagoning.

Really. You're really going to use that logical fallacy to support the religion for which you are a true believer.

The delicious irony of your hatred is that your point is so poorly argued, you must be a wikipedia editor.

I'm actually a pretty accomplished wikipedia editor with several original article credits. The articles are standing today. I have barnstars and everything. But I actually submit my articles to Encyclopedia Britannica now, because I realized the truth about wikipedia. It's just a really low quality content farm that can't be trusted on anything.

What is the point of getting your knowledge from unreliable losers? All the biggest wikipedia editors are no-life losers with zero respect in any real intellectual community. They are divorced from the community of experts and receive nothing but scorn from them.

What's the point of reading an encyclopedia written by people who you can't rely on? Getting 80% of the content right is not an achievement--every content farm on the internet does the same--from eHow to expertsexchange.

Wikipedia is just an ideology and volunteer driven low quality content farm. Due to Wikipedia's overpowering marketing/SEO, when Wikipedia writes an article on a topic, that Wikipedia article will now have higher visibility than the original information source that it scraped and now cites. The Wikipedia article will steal traffic from the original source.

The internet would be so much better without content farms. And Wikipedia is the worst of the worst.

When I feel like writing an encyclopedia article, I send it now to Encyclopedia Britannica. They've edited my writing and incorporated parts into their high quality encyclopedia.

By the way, that study that said that wikipedia was just as good as Britannica was complete bullshit--as flawed as your informal fallacy that you just shat out right above this comment.

Absolutely none of your comment is true; it reflects an unexamined bias and a complete unfamiliarity with the depths of wikipedia, how wikipedia stands up to alternatives, and the nature of the shitty content on wikipedia. Your opinion is completely worthless and it's safe to say you're an uneducated ideologue.

Britannica actually accepts user generated content. They are superior to wikipedia, however, in that they have credible experts vet the content.

The complaint about wikipedia is that it fails to live up to its ideals. If you had ever been a wikipedia editor you wouldn't talk the way you do. Even as a domain expert it's intolerable to deal with the wikipedia amateur hour culture. It's far more rewarding to submit your articles to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Isn't non-notable knowledge still knowledge? They are only interested in a small slice of human knowledge by their own sated goals.

It's inaccurate to say that wikipedia is fact checked or verified. The existence of a citation does not imply the existence of a fact check or a verification, or verifiability. Even when citations are high quality, the info they're supporting is still usually unverifiable due to wikipedia's disconnection from the community of experts.

Wikipedia is nothing more than the biggest plagiarist / content farm on the Internet. It isn't scrutinized because it has been grandfathered in.

Wikipedia is the ebaumsworld of information. Completely unreliable. Steals credit, traffic, royalties from the content creators. Policies focused on self preservation rather than serving a public good or respecting creators.

Your comment is itself a negative, middlebrow dismissal. The OPs negativity is middlebrow precisely because it's accurate, but it's beating a dead horse. This means it gets up voted repeatedly, whereas a genuinely low brow comment like "FUK U GAY WIKIPEDIA" would be quickly down voted.

The genealogists are always happy to share their data. It's part of the culture.

There's no open source genealogy programmers because the young nerds that do open source dont care about genealogy.

So a soft DOS then. Not much of a solution, still fully exploitable.

He didn't say cut off an IP address.

Paper doesn't harm the environment. Most lumber from NA is carbon neutral at worst, carbon capturing at best

That's like saying to get someone to stop punching you, just punch yourself.

DOSing yourself to stop a DOS :/

Some people have bad ears. Others have bad speakers/headphones.

You are probably both if you really believe that.

The Princess Bride is extremely popular among 20-40 year olds in the Anglosphere. Australia, Canada, USA, UK.

This narrows down your search for the Dread Pirate Roberts to like 150 million people. So the fact that this English speaking Silk Road founder is from the English speaking world and was probably a child or teenager in the 80s is not really narrowing it down much.

Retrograde amnesia doesn't impair implicit memory. Priming effects are still shown for amnesiac people.

This means that you'll be able to relearn your skills much more rapidly the second time around.

As far as the best way to do that, I would give the same advice that is given to anyone: find something you would enjoy working on and try to have fun working at it.

You may be right about WISPs.

I was referring to cellular networks and wired networks.

I'm guessing the hurdle is still legal/political. I'm gonna look into this, thanks for the insight

It's only a separate economy to the extent that it isn't instantly being converted back into some other currency.

There is a genuine bitcoin economy, and it is centered around the trade of goods that are illegal: child porn, weapons, viruses, credit card numbers, and most important of all: illegal drugs.

The question is not whether there is potential for a non-government backed digital currency. The question is whether bitcoin will be effective in that role given the design of the currency.

If a better currency is invented that includes some kind of inflationary mechanism, perhaps the drug trade/etc will take up that currency. In that case bitcoin truly will die.

>Traders learn; they adjust with respect to risk.

Ha ha ha ha

No. Traders learn, and then they die, and are replaced by new traders, who haven't learned.

what rural telco is building their own network?

in canada, the taxpayers built the network, then a corrupt government signed it over to a private cartel so they could charge rent.

it sounds like you're making some kind of Ayn Rand free market allusion. free markets dont apply when Dagne Taggart owns the government and closes all barriers to entry so that her railroads will never have meaningful competition.

You're kidding right? The issue is not a lack of entrepreneurs.

How is it a final battle? The plutocracy is not going anywhere. It is the new organizational principle for the Earth and it will last 2000 years just as the previous organizational principle did.

Why do you guys buy into this 10k hours bullshit?

The 10k hours claim is utter nonsense on the most basic level. How exactly is "one skill" defined? There is no such thing as "one skill." Every skill, field, whatever is a highly complex amalgam of countless sub-skills. How do you determine the extent of the "one skill" that you're devoting to?

Let's say you want to master 18th century history, defined as achieving a skill/knowledge level of X in that field. Does this take 10k hours? Why not 20k? Why not 5k? How can anyone assume that just because 18th century history has been defined as a particular "skill" that reaching some skill level X will take 10k hours?

If you instead choose to master early 18th century history from 1700-1730 so that you know the years 1700-1730 just as well as the 1700-1800 specialist, does it now take you only 3K hours instead of 10K?

Does any of this math make any sense at all?

Since the concept of "one skill" is utterly absurd nonsense that is completely undefinable, and the concept of "mastery" is equally undefinable and meaningless, this whole 10k meme is nothing but marketing bullshit of the kind that Gladwell mass produces in his shitty vapid books.

Gladwell is a hack of the highest order. He has never said anything meaningful. This 10k hour meme is just another marketing turd he shit out to mystify and flatter the dumb middle classes who read poppy trash like Gladwell so they can call themselves literate.

Fucking disgrace that people take this seriously