[HN Gopher] Rogue editors started a competing Wikipedia that's o...
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Rogue editors started a competing Wikipedia that's only about roads
Author : cainxinth
Score : 94 points
Date : 2024-03-02 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| ghaff wrote:
| I mean, it makes sense. There's an incredible rabbit's hole of
| detail on certain topics that probably doesn't belong on what
| purports to be a general purpose encyclopedia. Honestly a lot of
| mathematics etc. that is more or less worthless to people who
| aren't already experts in the area could probably use their own
| space too.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I don't understand why something being worthless to you makes
| it inappropriate to have on an encyclopedia we both read.
| lavajava wrote:
| I think the difficulty arises from finding a balance between
| a baseline that appeals to a general audience and an
| extensive repository for expert reference. Sifting through
| large Wikis can be daunting and discourage viewership. There
| is even an acronym for this: TL;DR
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long%3B_didn%2.
| ..
| ghaff wrote:
| At some point, a general purpose reference can get
| overwhelmed by specialized minutiae. I'm generally in the
| inclusionist camp with respect to Wikipedia, but I also don't
| think it's really an appropriate vessel for all of possible
| human knowledge. Which implies there is some line. So an
| article on the Big Dig is probably appropriate but not the
| blow by blow history of some country road.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Hiding irrelevant details from people that don't care about
| them is just a UI-puzzle that should be possible to solve
| imho.
| ghaff wrote:
| Just a simple matter of programming. And now you're
| asking for an algorithm to decide what you can see and
| not see.
| whatshisface wrote:
| How about the people who click on "homeomorphism" see an
| article on homeomorphisms and the people who click on
| "Route 48" see an article on Route 48?
| thfuran wrote:
| Is the article on route 48 meant to be a 500,000 word
| treatise on its history including every work order
| involved in its construction and maintenance as well as
| discussion of the procurement process for the paints used
| for its lines, or can some of that maybe be elided? Would
| you expect the article on homeomorphisms to include a
| list of every homeomorphism every described, suggested,
| defined, or posited?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Wikipedia has a couple of devices to solve this
| organizational problem: "full article" links that appear
| at the top of sections, and "list of X" pages. So in your
| examples, you'd have a three-sentence "History" section
| on the Route 48 page, with a link to the full article on
| the history of Route 48 at the top. For your second
| example, there would be a "see also" section at the
| bottom of the article, including a hyperlink to "List of
| Homeomorphisms."
| advisedwang wrote:
| Risks of too much low interest data in wikipedia include:
|
| * Not enough interest to update wiki when the subject
| changes; then wiki becomes out of date and unreliable.
|
| * Too few eyeballs allows false information to be added
| (accidentally or intentionally)
|
| * Becomes harder to do wiki-wide changes (of course it's
| inevitably too large for manual wiki-wide changes, but you
| can imagine more articles means more corner cases will be hit
| that will get automation mistakes or require more complex
| automation. Think info-boxes used in novel ways etc)
| whatshisface wrote:
| The first two are arguments against letting an individual
| write a single article about a unique topic, not against
| allowing a vibrant community of people with special
| interests document them in a public reference.
|
| The third could be solved by only deleting pages that use
| the wiki language in unmaintainable ways.
| bawolff wrote:
| A lot of making a high quality resource comes down to
| editing. Making sure you don't just include what you need but
| also remove what you don't. It is impossible to satisfy
| everyone, which is why i think it is a good thing to separate
| out to different resources when different groups want
| different things.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Deleting text from a page I can understand, but the context
| of this discussion is the deletion of thousands of pages.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's more the Wikipedia leadership that would have to be
| convinced. And looking at it that way, is it safe for all
| human knowledge to be gatekept by a single group?
| vvillena wrote:
| A lot of that content that is deemed "not Wikipedia worthy"
| ends up in Fandom, a for-profit wiki host also started by
| Jimmy Wales.
| flomo wrote:
| Yeah, I'm a 'roadgeek' and I thought many of the highway pages
| were overly verbose trivia. Long route descriptions clearly
| just taken from a map, random citations about ditch work in
| 2014 etc. Very little history or substance.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| If anyone wants to produce digital work about anything, there
| should be a home for that. Perhaps it doesn't belong in
| Wikipedia, but maybe there's like a "Wikipedia Open" sibling
| website that clearly communicates a lower standard of quality,
| relevance, curation, but generally ignores those requirements.
| Where I can write up my grandma's cookie recipe without having to
| manage my own website.
|
| "I think this is relevant. Here you go, world. Do with it what
| you may."
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| You're free to add grandma's recipe to Wikibook's Cookbook.
| https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oooh this is exactly what's on my mind. Awesome.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Wikibooks is a looser environment than Wikipedia for sure.
| I think you could probably start a book about anything
| there.
| bawolff wrote:
| That sounds like everything2 https://everything2.com/
| ghaff wrote:
| You can create your own website.
| nemomarx wrote:
| We already see this with niche things like gaming fandom details
| (every pokemon used to have a wiki page for a bit, but now that's
| all properly handled by Bulbapedia) so I wonder why we haven't
| seen it for more serious topics before? Math, Engineering, CS
| could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd think.
| dosshell wrote:
| One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to
| know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page.
|
| I think wikibooks is a good initiativ to solve this, and could
| be powerful when combined with a normal wiki.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm sure it is totally impossible because figuring out where
| to start (what's "obvious" to the reader), but a wiki that
| also has some sort of graph and could work out the
| dependencies for a given theorem, what you need to know to
| understand it, and then a couple applications (for examples)
| could be really useful. Automatic custom textbook on one
| specific topic.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Look up Abstract Wikipedia.
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia
|
| It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created
| using natural language generation on a functional
| programming base. The main goal is to generate content in
| any language from a common underlying structure, but one
| could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in
| that framework as well.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost
| need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki
| page.
|
| Case in point, nLab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage
|
| For instance,
| https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory
|
| Although this is partly inevitable because the content is
| really abstract, I _know_ there are more approachable ways to
| define "monad" than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _almost need to know what it is before reading to
| understand the wiki page_
|
| There is a project page advocating more accessible technical
| articles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_techni
| cal_artic...
|
| In some cases technical subjects just require some pretty
| steep prerequisite knowledge, but where possible it's nice to
| try to make them as accessible as can be done practically
| within the space constraint of a few introductory paragraphs.
| Usually that means trying to aim at least part of any article
| at approximately "1 level below" the level where students are
| expected to first encounter the topic in their formal study.
| (This isn't always accomplished, and feel free to complain on
| specific pages that fall far short.)
|
| Writing for a extremely diverse audience with diverse needs
| is a hard problem. And more generally, writing well as a
| pseudonymous volunteer collective is really hard, and a lot
| of the volunteers just aren't very good writers. Then some
| topics are politicized, ...
|
| How much time have you personally spent trying to make
| technical articles whose subjects you do know about more
| accessible to newcomers? If anyone reading this discussion
| has the chance, please try to chip away at this problem, even
| if it's just contributing to articles about e.g. high school
| or early undergraduate level topics - many of these are not
| accessible at the appropriate level. But if you are an expert
| about some tricky technical topic in e.g. computing or
| biology or mechanical engineering, go get involved in fixing
| it up.
| rightbyte wrote:
| A benefit of knowing a non-english language is that my native
| language wiki entry usually is a good tldr of the english
| one.
|
| Many of the english math entries seem to be written for math
| students (as in math program students, not students studying
| math).
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes Wikipedia is really bad for maths articles. They're all
| written by people who just learnt about the topic and are
| showing off their pedantically detailed knowledge of it.
|
| I recommend Mathworld. Much much better.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| It seems to me that the line has been drawn at perceived
| academic interest. "Notability" is highly context-dependent,
| but I find that it's easier to identify Wikipedia's line of
| notability when you consider the potential academic usefulness
| of a particular article. Minutae of science, history,
| mathematics, etc seem more likely to be "academically
| significant" than a county road in Michigan, or a Pokemon.
|
| When I was a kid, I was taught to reject Wikipedia as an
| academic source. I know I'm not the only one. Part of me
| wonders if their present moderation is influenced by that.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source_
|
| What ends up happening is people (including academics in
| published work) still use Wikipedia as a source, but just
| don't mention it. This is much worse than just citing
| Wikipedia, because it can lead to "citogenesis", whereby a
| claim that originated (without evidence) in Wikipedia is then
| given credibility by being republished elsewhere. Sorting out
| what happened later is a huge pain, and many examples slip
| through the cracks.
|
| Overall, Wikipedia should be taken for what it is: a
| moderately inconsistent tertiary source written by
| pseudonymous volunteers some of whom are dispassionate world-
| class experts and others of whom are incompetent amateurs,
| ideologues, or trolls.
|
| However, what I've found tracking down lots of Wikipedia
| claims over the years is that Wikipedia is on average no less
| reliable than many other kinds of sources that are taken more
| seriously, including paper encyclopedias and peer-reviewed
| journal articles (and don't get me started on newspaper
| articles). Every source and author should be carefully
| evaluated for credibility and read with at least some
| skepticism.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Math, Engineering, CS could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd
| think.
|
| There are some specialized ones like
| https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo
| jjmarr wrote:
| Because ultimately, Wikipedia's criteria for allowing articles
| is whether or not the subject of such has sufficient content in
| reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic
| articles) to base an article on. Otherwise, most of the article
| is going to be someone's personal opinions or their own
| research. Most minor American roads and Pokemon don't have that
| coverage beyond showing they exist and their route. Allowing
| those articles to be created is a signal that "there's reliable
| newspapers or academics covering the history of this highway"
| when in truth if a history section is ever added, it's not
| going to be based on anything beyond what the editor came up
| with.
|
| That is what distinguishes Wikipedia from large language models
| or Google which'll say they have information on a given topic
| even if their sources are questionable. The value-add of
| Wikipedia is curation, and when the quality of one's outputs is
| a function of one's inputs, it's sometimes better to just _not
| give an output_ when the input doesn 't exist.
| ghaff wrote:
| >has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like
| newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on
|
| Which is, of course, completely ironic. Wikipedia's
| notability criterion depends heavily on books in some library
| stack that essentially no one will ever actually check or
| appearances in other print form that no one will check
| either.
|
| I've found a couple of minor "folk histories" of things that
| appear to not have been true after looking at actual books
| (which may have not been actually accurate either though they
| seemed plausible).
| Angostura wrote:
| Not really ironic, because they _can_ be checked.
| ghaff wrote:
| As a practical matter however... Almost no one's going to
| visit the $SMALLTOWN historical society and do so.
| They're going to do a web search.
| tux3 wrote:
| That's part of why digital libraries are important!
|
| Wikipedia has its own "Wikipedia Library", which is a
| system to allow active editors access to high-quality
| sources. But if it has to be resorting to Sci-Hub or
| libgen to check sources for Wikipedia, that's also a form
| of public service.
| snowfield wrote:
| Someone has probably checked them at some point. And that's
| good enough for me
| toyg wrote:
| Not if that someone was a neofascist with an agenda to
| rewrite relatively minor history.
|
| Sadly that happens, and it happens a lot more than most
| people realize. It's way too easy to fake a reputation on
| Wikipedia.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| There's an opposite irony, too: Wikipedia doesn't want to
| be a location for original research, but moving the pages
| _out_ of Wikipedia means they _could_ now be a suitable
| citation source for articles on Wikipedia.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| For a lot of these fields researchers already feel like they
| are contributing to the community by writing manuscripts.
| Making a wiki of that written for lay people is a fruitless
| waste of time, wikipedia entries are good enough for lay people
| and people in the field would probably rather read a legitimate
| review article with 150 sources.
| CM30 wrote:
| Hmm a quick check of Google brought up at least a few wikis
| about maths:
|
| https://math.fandom.com/wiki/Math_Wiki
| https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Main_Page
|
| And a few about engineering:
|
| https://engineering.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Wiki
|
| Plus a few about computer related topics:
|
| https://dataengineering.wiki/Index
|
| And various languages and frameworks have wikis too, like
| Python, PHP, WordPress, etc.
|
| So there's definitely some interest in wikis outside of fandom
| topics. The Wiki listing pages on Wikipedia has at least 30% of
| the page listing wikis that don't involve a piece of
| media/fiction:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis
|
| I suspect the disparity is probably because hobbies and fandoms
| could mostly only communicate via the internet, and naturally
| went from fansites and hobby sites to wikis. Meanwhile more
| academic subjects have an audience who seem to be unsure of the
| value of these sorts of free resources.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Fandom is complete and utter SEO garbage - every single
| fandom with enough nerds to have sense has moved off of it
| into an actual independent wiki. IndieWikiBuddy is an
| extension that actually takes fandom websites, and redirects
| google searches to the actual community run page.
| https://getindie.wiki/
| movpasd wrote:
| For maths, there is also ncatlab.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I think about trying to start a math and physics wiki all the
| time. Basically it needs to keep track of as many major results
| and link them all to each other and map between their
| terminologies. It is so exhausting that so many results are
| hiding in papers from other subfields that use slightly
| different notations and terminology so you can't find easily
| find them.
| StevenXC wrote:
| https://Topology.pi-base.org (a database of certain
| mathematical objects) started as a wiki, but transitioned to
| using GitHub pull requests and custom software to support
| automated deduction.
|
| Folks interested in open collaborative math content may find
| these interesting:
|
| - https://code4math.org/ - https://mathbases.org/
| arjie wrote:
| This is a great idea, I think. Mediawiki is very good about
| allowing multiple sites and since interwiki links are bundled in
| you can just link Wikipedia pages like they're local to the wiki.
|
| I actually use Mediawiki for my blog.
| _aleph2c_ wrote:
| If you think this is interesting, see what happens when you try
| and edit the page of Susan Gerbic; the leader of the Guerilla
| Skeptics. She runs a gang of over 150 Wikipedia members who have
| taken over 1500+ articles. They are like the deletionist
| described in the article, but operate as an open conspiracy
| advancing an atheist-materialist point of view. They actively
| recruit new members, run them through extensive training about
| the Wikipedia ecosystem and how to dominate it as a team.
| jumelles wrote:
| https://www.wired.com/story/guerrilla-wikipedia-editors-who-...
|
| They seem to defend against conspiracy theories and falsehoods.
| Why are you calling them a "gang"? What are the "dominating"?
| Why is this bad?
| bloopernova wrote:
| Reminds me of Everything2. It started as a freeform text linking
| site, where nodes (pages) could be linked just like a wiki these
| days. It was written by some of the slashdot crew, back around
| 2000. The site grew and attracted a fun crowd who really liked
| the freeform wiki-like interface. Unfortunately some of the
| admins wanted to compete with Wikipedia, so the fun, frivolous
| stuff was discouraged over purely factual nodes. This meant that
| some people stopped contributing. I left around that time.
|
| https://everything2.com/
|
| Huh it's still going! It must be 25 years old now, not a bad
| achievement.
| unwind wrote:
| Founded (as "Everything1") in 1998 according to the other site.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Oh right! Yeah I completely forgot about its initial
| incarnation being named that.
|
| It was definitely a new frontier where we thought anything
| was possible. Just being able to easily link between
| nodes/pages was a very cool feature back then.
| thoughtFrame wrote:
| That's interesting, because I checked out everything2 last year
| to see what I had missed out on, and found it a nice place with
| poetry and personal essays. Maybe at some point their culture
| changed again?
| bloopernova wrote:
| It's entirely possible! I left sometime in the mid 2000s, so
| there's certainly a lot of time for cultures to have changed
| significantly even multiple times.
| layer8 wrote:
| Just to be pedantic: They started a separate wiki (that isn't
| really in competition with Wikipedia), not a "competing
| Wikipedia" (which is the name of a specific wiki).
| john-radio wrote:
| And while we're being pedantic:
|
| > The dispute came down to some of Wikipedia's most sacred
| tenants. Anyone can edit Wikipedia...
|
| Tenets!
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Perhaps it was quickly fixed, but it says "tenets" now.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Right. If it's a field that Wikipedia refuses to engage in,
| then by definition it can't be a competitor.
| layer8 wrote:
| AARoads is not a competitor to Wikipedia because it doesn't
| try to be a general-purpose encyclopedia. Similar to how HN
| is not a Reddit competitor. They have different goals and
| thus complement each other.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I mean...this is precisely what's supposed to happen when you
| have a niche interest? And this is a better situation for them
| anyway because now they can use some structured data extension
| (SMW, Cargo,* WikiBase, DPL) specifically tailored to their needs
| and create a lot more advanced querying/filtering features that
| are super usable by the average person rather than requiring you
| to know SPARQL. Wikipedia doesn't support SMW or Cargo (for good
| reason) but on specific-subject wikis that aren't literally the
| scale of Wikipedia one of these is pretty much a must-have if the
| admins are tech-savvy enough to make good use of them. (My
| recommendation is Cargo but either can work)
|
| *no relationship to the Rust package manager, it's a SQL wrapper
| for MediaWiki
|
| I would say the headline here if anything is, "WikiMedia doesn't
| support niche-interest wikis that run alongside Wikipedia" and
| instead make you either self-host or use a farm (Fandom,
| Miraheze, Wiki.gg, etc).
| epivosism wrote:
| I recently have been thinking about UGC site in general, and it
| seems like they generally go two ways:
|
| 1. Allow most legal content to be uploaded and control
| distribution with algos
|
| YouTube, Roblox, Twitter, Tinder, Flickr, Insta, FB, TikTok.
|
| This lets users practice and test things without risk to their
| work or account.
|
| 2. Sites that try to "keep the db clean" by nuking stuff they
| think is "bad" by some criteria.
|
| Sites like this: Wikipedia, most big subreddits
|
| Type 2 sites can be unsustainable because they tend to make new
| users feel judged, and don't give them the chance to iterate and
| improve their work until it's more ready to be shared and useful
| to a broader audience. You just find your content nuked, or
| removed from the subreddit, or downvoted a ton, often with a
| dismissive or aggressive comment. This is NOT the way to grow and
| survive as a company over a long period of time
|
| Obviously, there is no necessity to keep the db full of only high
| quality items. As the scope and number of niches a site covers,
| it's not possible to maintain that. On the other hand, using
| algos lets you do interactive tests with content, directly
| testing against various audiences to see if they like it, without
| having to do editorial work yourself.
|
| Of course, there has to be some limit - articles for every
| pokemon, or every version of every pokemon, etc at some point it
| does get too far. The thing for me is coming in and seeing your
| content completely deleted.
| itishappy wrote:
| I may be missing your point, but Wikipedia and most big
| subreddits have proven quite effective at growing and
| surviving.
|
| I'd also suggest a major distinction between type 1 and type 2
| sites are a focus on creation vs consumption. There's a lot
| more consumers than producers and, depending on your goals, it
| might improve the experience for more users by deleting the
| content of some.
| epivosism wrote:
| I have heard the editor count at Wikipedia has been shrinking
| for years. Might have been wrong though
| devmor wrote:
| >most big subreddits have proven quite effective at growing
| and surviving.
|
| That depends on your criteria. If popularity and user
| engagement are the only important metrics, this is absolutely
| true.
|
| If however, clarity of purpose and effective moderation are
| important, I would strongly disagree. From my experience,
| most big subreddits that used to fulfill a certain niche have
| devolved into primarily meta-posting and stealth (or not
| stealth at all) advertisement.
|
| Of the exceptions to the above, many now just fill the exact
| same purpose. There are around 10 extremely large subreddits
| that regularly make the front page that are essentially just
| "look at this picture of something I have/something I saw"
| with no real boundary between them.
| kiba wrote:
| Moderation is a must or else there will be rampant
| misinformation and hate speech.
|
| Reddit is fine but it's not really operable as a business
| enterprise unless you are fine with making a small tiny profit
| over long period of time.
|
| Subreddits are a self solving problem over time. They grow big
| and shrink on their own merits and damage is self contained.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Using those definitions there are really no type 1 sites except
| _maybe_ 4chan, which itself even lightly moderates. All the
| other sites you mention heavily moderate and most of them
| automate that moderation.
|
| You really can't have a site that's a free-for-all because of
| spammers, griefers, racists, and other various forms of jerks.
| ginko wrote:
| I still think Wikipedia's focus on significance was a historic
| mistake. At the very least there should have been an "extended"
| Wikipedia+ that strived to include all human knowledge no matter
| how trivial.
|
| Not having this meant for-profit companies like Wikia (now
| fandom.com) could take over much of that space, pervasive
| tracking and ads included.
| chriskanan wrote:
| I 100% agree. They also apply rules inconsistently, where the
| handful of times I've tried to make an article on well-known
| scientists (h-index 70+) years ago, the editors rejected it
| despite some secondary sources. On the other hand there are
| many articles being created by some editor on scientists who
| have almost no track record.
|
| Wikipedia is already one of the best data sources for training
| LLMs, and if they were less stringent, it could even be a
| better resource.
| yreg wrote:
| This is the system working as intended. It's great that they are
| putting their original research on AARoads. Wikipedia can quote
| the noteworthy parts.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Would they? Wouldn't that be "original research"?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, agree. Wikipedia's rules are being used as a club and
| it's too bad.
|
| We get it that people will abuse Wikipedia and it must suck
| to cull all of the ephemera people submit (not the best word
| for it but the only one that comes to my mind).
|
| But I think rules should allow for nuance.
|
| Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-
| Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in topics
| more akin to Urban Dictionary entries. Sort it's entries to
| the bottom of the search results, serve up a light yellow
| background for sub-pedia pages to make it clear these are not
| conforming articles. But it seems to me like a generally bad
| idea to be a ruthless gatekeeper for the enthusiastic and
| motivated contributors out there.
| joshuahutt wrote:
| > Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-
| Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in
| topics more akin to Urban Dictionary entries.
|
| It's an interesting idea. I imagine a sort of "Official"
| and "Unofficial" modes. You could flip a switch and see the
| articles and edits that didn't pass muster.
|
| That way, the ideas and info wouldn't be lost/censored, but
| wouldn't get to claim they're "formally accepted."
| Macha wrote:
| Their name might get them in trouble with the AA, a UK and
| Ireland insurance company who has products such as AA Roadwatch.
|
| Other than that potential future problem, this is pretty much the
| system working as intended, and they're following the path led by
| sites such as Wookiepedia.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| The site these former Wikipedia editors are joining has existed
| since 2000, is primarily US-focused, and is named after two
| people in the US with first names beginning with A:
| https://www.aaroads.com/about/ So this new migration shouldn't
| affect that site's legal risk from the UK and Ireland company,
| which seems pretty low anyway given that context.
| KTibow wrote:
| I find Wikipedia's frontend more enjoyable than AARoads. It's
| understandable as the community of editors probably wasn't as
| technical as some other communities, but it feels a bit slow,
| there's no search, and there are a number of broken links.
| notatoad wrote:
| It makes sense that the consumption side of the site isn't as
| good, since super-niche sites like this are more for the
| benefit of the writers than the readers. The value and
| enjoyment is in collecting the information, not retrieving it.
|
| And that might sound like a criticism, but it's really not.
| Niche interest sites where people spend their time collecting a
| huge level of detail on a topic few care about are awesome, and
| I love them. Just realistically, they're not there for the
| readers.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Isn't "a competing Wikipedia that's only about X" just called...
| a wiki?
| ern wrote:
| Wikipedia seems to have a growing contingent of editors from
| countries like India, the Phillipines and Sri Lanka who edit
| topics that seemingly have little to do with those countries.
|
| To establish their credentials, they get involved in arcane areas
| like Articles for Deletion or other areas that you'd expect would
| be of more interest to experienced editors.
|
| Now everyone has the right to edit anything on Wikipedia, but
| it's starting to feel like paid editors have gained a foothold.
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(page generated 2024-03-02 23:00 UTC)