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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: 0s | 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. spankibalt ◴[01 Nov 25 14:26 UTC] No.45781887[source]▶
> Its only good at basics and cannot handle complex information well.

Poppycock! Because of MediaWiki's multimedia capabilities it can handle complex information just fine, obviously much better than printed predecessors. What you mean is a Wiki's focus, which can take the form of a generalized or universal encylopedia (e. g. Wikipedia), or a specialized one, or a free-form one (Wikipedia, in practice, again). Wikipedias even negotiate integration of different information streams, e. g. up-to-date news-like information, both in the lemmata (often a huge problem, i. e. "newstickeritis"), in its own news wiki (Wikinews), or the English Wikipedia's newspaper, The Signpost.

And to take care of another utterly bizarre comment: Encylopedias are always, per defintion, also repositories of knowledge.