Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

If you speak other languages Wikipedia certainly gets very interesting. German Wikipedia is pretty good, for some topics it is better than English Wikipedia. But Spanish Wikipedia is quite sad to read, todays articles have the quality I remember from when Wikipedia was 2 or 3 years old even though there are many times more Spanish than German speakers in the world. Then there are the Swedish and Cebuana Wikipedias which are large but were mostly created by a bot with almost useless stub articles.

It makes me wonder what information sources other countries like China, India or Japan use.

Wikipedia is becoming so much more than an encyclopedia. I am constantly amazed at the level of detail people are willing to document things in.

For instance, I wanted to find which episode I was up to in a particular series, so I Google it, find a Wikipedia page for the series, and sure enough there's a table listing every season and every episode, with a short synopsis of each episode.

I'd say a very large portion of all page views are due to media related queries (TV shows, movies, books etc.).

Please don't hate on my comment, all I can do is ask not to be downvoted, at least I tried. Here is my case against Wikipedia. In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected. If we assume that line of thinking is valid (which I'm not saying we should or shouldn't) then it follows that an alternative Wikipedia riddled with ads would be a superior model, in terms of capitalism. It'd be much more similar to imdb perhaps, owned by Amazon. Wikipedia (in the film category) provides information in a much effective way and can stay on top of change by issuing revisions way better than imdb can ever do.

If we jump to the most logical conclusion of the set of assumptions made above I think it then follows that readily accessible knowledge cannot necessarily be a good thing, otherwise, the market would have rewarded that. But we see in the case of imdb market did not reward it enough for it to achieve the same pedigree as Wikipedia.

It's not good for people to learn facts that easily. There should be a higher cost associated with that. This is of course a ridiculous conclusion but I think it could make sense why it would be true. It is a whole other post for why it would be true but I will only give an example or two.

One example is if knowledge is that easily accessible then anyone could achieve it without necessarily having enough desire to achieve said knowledge, and since we have limited capacity for knowledge acquisition and retainment we are most likely sacrificing knowledge that we are truly passionate about.

Second example is maybe it isn't good for people to know so much anyway. After all there are many things that due to the laws of nature we are inherently incapable of ever knowing such as what is beyond knowable universe (nothing can travel faster than speed of light so we cannot learn about it since the knowledge or light from stuff beyond the knowable universe won't have enough time to ever reach us.)

To take a contrarian viewpoint: maybe Wikipedia isn't so good after all.

In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected. If we assume that line of thinking is valid (which I'm not saying we should or shouldn't) then it follows that an alternative Wikipedia riddled with ads would be a superior model, in terms of capitalism. It'd be much more similar to imdb perhaps, owned by Amazon. Wikipedia (in the film category) provides information in a much effective way and can stay on top of change by issuing revisions way better than imdb can ever do. If we jump to the most logical conclusion of the set of assumptions made above I think it then follows that readily accessible knowledge cannot necessarily be a good thing, otherwise, the market would have rewarded that. But we see in the case of imdb market did not reward it enough for it to achieve the same pedigree as Wikipedia.

It's not good for people to learn facts that easily. There should be a higher cost associated with that. This is of course a ridiculous conclusion but I think it could make sense why it would be true. It is a whole other post for why it would be true but I will only give an example or two.

One example is if knowledge is that easily accessible then anyone could achieve it without necessarily having enough desire to achieve said knowledge, and since we have limited capacity for knowledge acquisition and retainment we are most likely sacrificing knowledge that we are truly passionate about.

Second example is maybe it isn't good for people to know so much anyway. After all there are many things that due to the laws of nature we are inherently incapable of ever knowing such as what is beyond knowable universe (nothing can travel faster than speed of light so we cannot learn about it since the knowledge or light from stuff beyond the knowable universe won't have enough time to ever reach us.)