[HN Gopher] Wikenigma - an Encyclopedia of Unknowns
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Wikenigma - an Encyclopedia of Unknowns
Author : jgamman
Score : 172 points
Date : 2025-01-25 20:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wikenigma.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (wikenigma.org.uk)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Wikenigma - an encyclopedia of scientific questions with no
| known answers_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181165 -
| Dec 2022 (11 comments)
|
| _Wikenigma is an encyclopedia for topics with unknown answers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210258 - July 2022 (72
| comments)
|
| (Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are
| just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
| doener wrote:
| I also posted it 4 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42783625
| dang wrote:
| Ah yes - and a couple others did in the last week, too. I
| wonder why!
|
| It's a bit of a lottery which instance of a submission ends
| up 'winning' a frontpage position. The intention is to build
| some sort of aggregation mechanism that will involve karma
| sharing in the future. In the meantime, I guess it does at
| least even out in the long run if one keeps submitting
| articles (and thanks for doing that!)
| mastersummoner wrote:
| I'm glad you're thinking about this. It's always strange to
| search for a topic, and find a dozen hits, most with one
| post max, and one which went absolutely viral.
|
| In a world where karma/upvotes/etc actually does contribute
| to reputation, it seems unfair and arbitrary.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > In a world where karma/upvotes/etc actually does
| contribute to reputation, it seems unfair and arbitrary.
|
| For the most part I think it doesn't happen that much on
| HN. There are maybe a handful of people that I recognize
| by name because of their volume of comments. But I don't
| normally look at or consider how much karma someone has
| or hasn't got when I read random comments from random
| people.
|
| HN took steps specifically to avoid some of the negative
| effects of karma influencing how comments are perceived
| by removing the display of how many points each comment
| has in the discussion under each post.
|
| Usually the only time I click through to someone's
| profile specifically to look at their karma is if they
| said something that seemed purposefully inflammatory and
| I'm wondering if they have a habit of trolling (and
| therefore have very low karma), or if it was just a one-
| off thing that maybe came out wrong or maybe they're just
| having a particularly bad day today. Or maybe I'm even
| just misinterpreting as inflammatory what was not meant
| like that by them.
|
| But if you do want to know how much karma those that have
| the most have, since you're bringing up the topic of
| karma, there's also this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
|
| The karma leaderboard.
| dang wrote:
| > karma/upvotes/etc actually does contribute to
| reputation
|
| I hope not!
| Andrex wrote:
| I wonder if instead of a number, users are told what
| their "karmic trend" is.
|
| Like if your last three comments got upvotes, it would
| say "you're trending good" or something (and vice versa
| for downvotes). People's monkey brains get too focused on
| a single number which inevitably gets tied to their
| identity/reputation, even on a place like HN where it's
| essentially invisible.
|
| I wouldn't lose a wink if you decided to hide the karma
| system completely from us HN users, but I'm sure some
| would.
| mastersummoner wrote:
| Much less here than on, say, Reddit. But it's not
| nothing!
| bigdict wrote:
| Does it have an entry for what we don't know we don't know?
| khnorgaard wrote:
| Well dude. We just don't know.
| trevithick wrote:
| https://www.theuncertaintyproject.org/tools/rumsfeld-matrix
| sangeeth96 wrote:
| TIL there is a name for this.
|
| > In 2002, during a press briefing about the Iraq War, Donald
| Rumsfeld famously divided information into four categories:
| known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown
| unknowns. These distinctions became the basis for the
| Rumsfeld Matrix, a decision-making framework that maps and
| evaluates the various degrees of certainty and uncertainty.
|
| Wiki page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 1400 articles, spanning math to medicine to biology to archeology
| and more...this is a tiny sip of an ocean of unknowns.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Considering the infinity of knowable facts, and the finite
| number of facts which are known, any list of unknowns will
| always be a drop in the proverbial bucket.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| well said. the more you know, the more you know what you
| don't know.
|
| take all knowledge of known things and imagine its a circle,
| the radius is touching known unknowns.
|
| as known grows, the radius expands and touches more unknowns.
|
| i don't think that will ever end.
|
| I wonder if this might cause the perception coined by
| 'idiocracy', that people keep being 'dumber'. actually they
| know relatively the same but its better understood that its
| really not a lot thats known?
| omoikane wrote:
| I wonder why Travelling Salesman Problem is included but not
| other NP-hard problems.
|
| https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/computer_science/the_ravell...
|
| (The URL really says "ravelling" and not "travelling". Maybe this
| article was hastily added)
| ruined wrote:
| other np-hard problems are not included because you haven't
| added them to the wiki
| rerdavies wrote:
| To add them to the "wiki", you'd have to be able to edit the
| wiki. You cannot. I rather wanted to edit the "Liar Paradox"
| (sic) page, but there doesn't seem to be any way to do so.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| rtfm O:-) https://wikenigma.org.uk/info:notes_for_contribut
| ors:registr...
| encomiast wrote:
| Maybe they meant to add the np-complete version, in which case,
| do you really need more than one?
| tomcam wrote:
| The "random article" link is irresistible
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is super fun!
|
| But I'm not super clear why it's a site of its own, rather than a
| list on Wikipedia?
|
| Surely it's a list as serious as:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
|
| Or is there something less objective about it?
| codetrotter wrote:
| The "curator's rationale" page maybe sheds some light on that,
| indirectly.
|
| That Wikenigma aims to be about "known unknowns" and igniting
| curiosity. While Wikipedia is about gathering knowledge ("known
| knowns"). Possibly.
|
| https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia
|
| Although Wikipedia also has articles covering known unknowns.
|
| I guess a reason for having Wilenigma is that it's a place you
| can go and explore many different known unknowns without
| getting sucked into articles about known knowns. Possibly.
|
| For example, both Wikenigma and Wikipedia have features for
| jumping to a random article. If you are looking specifically
| for known unknowns, it would be much better to use the link for
| random article on Wikenigma than on Wikipedia.
|
| I am reminded of an animation I one time saw about a guy that
| was collecting questions. I can't find it now, but if anyone
| knows which one I'm thinking of, please link it. I think
| watching that short animation illustrates a similar kind of
| idea to what seems to be the idea behind Wikenigma.
| oguz-ismail wrote:
| > why it's a site of its own, rather than a list on Wikipedia?
|
| Wikipedia is too politic for the casual reader and begs for
| money all the time.
| xandrius wrote:
| If even Wikipedia is too political then I've got a bad news
| for you...
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Wikipedia being too political is a hard problem to fix but
| the ads and begging for money has an easy solution; Make an
| account, got to preferences -> banners and uncheck
| fundraising and whatever else you don't want to see.
|
| An account is useful in many other ways too
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I was surprised to find out that we apparently don't have a
| definitive explanation for how hangovers work:
| https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/medicine/diseases/g-l/hango...
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| so basically one of the articles talks about why there should be
| an equal amount of matter and antimatter in the universe but in
| reality we havent been able to find antimatter, is it possible
| that our entire observable universe is a small area with matter
| rich concentration and there exists a much much bigger structure
| of the order of 1 decillion light years where random areas have
| concentrations of matter and antimatter and we are unfortunately
| stuck in the area with matter?
| jokellum wrote:
| This is something that confused me also. I feel like this is a
| reasonable argument.
|
| My only criticism I guess would be that this is unfalsifiable,
| so for the time being it's more productive to see if there's
| any possibility to explain that within the observable universe.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That would violate the Cosmological principle - the idea that
| viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the
| universe are the same for all observers. Also the Copernican
| principle - the idea that our observation point in the universe
| is pretty average and not overly special.
|
| Of course both of these principles aren't strongly supported by
| evidence. They are still usually assumed because they keep
| cosmology sane and verifiable.
| ggm wrote:
| We just don't know is what I think Feynman was getting at in his
| criticism of physics teaching and how it tries to leverage the
| nth layer and n-1th layer to explain actions in the n+1 layer.
| jl6 wrote:
| I wonder if there is an ethical limit to some categories of
| knowledge. There are surely some sociological phenomena which are
| currently unexplained, but could potentially be explained by,
| say, incredibly invasive monitoring of peoples' lives, but which
| we would probably rather remain unexplained than go down that
| route.
| ninjanomnom wrote:
| Get a large enough population and you'll be able to get
| volunteers for any conceivable experiment.
| jl6 wrote:
| I'm not sure. Imagine you want to answer the research
| question of how people come to adopt certain beliefs. You can
| probably answer that robustly by monitoring absolutely all
| their cultural inputs - including throughout childhood where
| these inputs likely have high impact, but where consent for
| such an experiment is likely impossible. Every book they
| read, every website they visit, every person they listen to.
| I think if you constrain this experiment to a more reasonable
| level of information gathering, you'll miss important
| details.
| ninjanomnom wrote:
| You could get permission from the parents to install the
| recording devices, but until the child is grown up the data
| could be kept locked away somewhere completely
| inaccessible. Then when the child is old enough to grant
| permission you unlock that data for use. This sort of
| pattern should work for all studies involving children.
|
| Honestly though, most of these kinds of studies would
| probably just stop at getting permission from the parents.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Apparently philosophers don't know what holes are:
|
| > https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/philosophy/holes
| speerer wrote:
| Mathematicians, meanwhile, have multiple answers:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ymF1bp-qrjU
| slashtab wrote:
| Never would have thought Holes getting so complicated.
|
| I think I need classes on Topology and Knots.
| mr_toad wrote:
| That's funny because the concept of a gap or void as a
| fundamental part of the universe has been around for thousands
| of years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I was thinking about this concept yesterday, in the context of AI
| automation in the sciences.
|
| It is difficult for anyone in any scientific field to know where
| the big knowledge gaps are. Yet I can plausibly imagine a method
| whereby LLMs could identify research gaps, particularly when
| supported by scientists in the field.
|
| In a near world where human scientists and AI collaborate much
| more closely on semiautomated scientific knowledge production,
| finding and filling knowledge gaps might be an approach for
| guiding work.
| mattkevan wrote:
| Hit the random button a few times and every article was bird-
| related.
|
| Every time I see a bird up close I'm struck by how weird they
| are, but I didn't realise they were quite so mysterious.
| financetechbro wrote:
| I must've hit the random button 10 times and haven't seen any
| bird related mysteries
| sim7c00 wrote:
| bandwidth limit exceeded :<
| legrandmag wrote:
| Seems like the server is down. Or OP has reached their bandwidth,
| hence the website not accessible
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(page generated 2025-01-26 23:02 UTC)