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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

(www.tbray.org)
175 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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physarum_salad ◴[31 Oct 25 22:27 UTC] No.45777378[source]▶
"Wikipedia, in my mind, has two main purposes: A quick visit to find out the basics about some city or person or plant or whatever, or a deep-dive to find out what we really know about genetic linkages to autism or Bach’s relationship with Frederick the Great or whatever."

Completely agree with the first purpose but would never use wikipedia for the second purpose. Its only good at basics and cannot handle complex information well.

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1. generationP ◴[31 Oct 25 23:38 UTC] No.45777898[source]▶
Yeah, encyclopedias are meant to be indexes to knowledge, not repositories thereof. The WP feature-creeped its way to the latter, but it is not reliably good at it, and I'm not sure if there is an easy way to tell how good a given page is without knowing the subject in the first place.