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Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

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598 points leotravis10 | 5 comments | 04 Sep 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.655s | source
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djoldman ◴[04 Sep 25 16:30 UTC] No.45129069[source]▶
> Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects.

but:

> The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress#Holdings

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jalapenod[dead post] ◴[04 Sep 25 16:33 UTC] No.45129102[source]▶
[flagged]
1. LtWorf ◴[04 Sep 25 16:48 UTC] No.45129286[source]▶
Honestly it's the first place I look when I must implement some network protocol.
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2. mschuster91 ◴[04 Sep 25 16:54 UTC] No.45129367[source]▶
yup. the amount of times I have looked up how to send an email over raw SMTP for troubleshooting...
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3. freedomben ◴[04 Sep 25 16:55 UTC] No.45129371[source]▶
Network protocol stuff on Wikipedia has been top notch and my go-to since at least 2010. It really is highly underrated for that. I had to implement a layer 7 protocol on top of UDP back in the day, and it required a lot of understanding/fiddling with UDP and IP packet details to get it working right, and even required some router config (IP fragmentation became a huge problem, gotta love protocols designed by committee D-:)
4. mdp2021 ◴[04 Sep 25 17:12 UTC] No.45129604[source]▶
...And on the contrary, I got deliria from an LLM in a similar area just hours ago.

This probably highlights how human contribution or automated referencing both have a root in the sources, that should be recovered as a focus. Part of the future of the presentation of information should be hyperlinking "to the book pages".

5. jowea ◴[05 Sep 25 14:06 UTC] No.45138764[source]▶
Yeah, lots of the weaker parts of Wikipedia relate either to political controversy or things that the editor base doesn't care as much about.