School vs. Wikipedia

Post by random314 » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

NavinF wrote: post #203

GCA10 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. It's especially frustrating to come across what I'll call "Mudslide Pages" for prominent entities. These consist of a decade or more of minor news items, piled atop one another. No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when. So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of…

I've noticed a similar phenomenon on pages about machine learning. There are entire sections about now-obsolete ideas that people only talked about for a few months before moving on.

Post by random314 » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

winphone1974 wrote: post #295

encylopinion wrote: post #111

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I stopped using Wikipedia a while ago. Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful. I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction. I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.

So you stopped using it, but now use it less, and you read history articles that are fiction because they're so old, but the quality had declined recently? Pick a lane.

Post by random314 » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #158

thebooktocome wrote: post #134

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equatio... Repetitive content, written at several levels simultaneously, weird fixations on tangential topics.

Not only that, 4 paragraphs until the first citation, 16 paragraphs until the next one. All that information might be correct, but there's no easy way to confirm it. PDEs are a significant enough thing that the article is probably correct. But once you get into more niche math articles, a lot of the writing is incorrect.

Post by Slow_Hand » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:37 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #272

throwaway09223 wrote: post #191

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When was the last time you read through a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica? Have you done an apples to apples comparison? No encyclopedia is perfect, but as far as I can tell the "standard" encyclopedias are a lot worse. My grandparents had bought a copy of Britannica decades ago and they had something like 50 years of its yearbooks. I would cite it sometimes and no one at school batted an eye. I remember reading thro…

Maybe traditional encyclopedia might give wikipedia a run for the money on subjects, say toilet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper But wikipedia is far ahead on more practical articles like which way the toilet paper goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation

Post by OJFord » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

codetrotter wrote: post #331

m463 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe traditional encyclopedia might give wikipedia a run for the money on subjects, say toilet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper But wikipedia is far ahead on more practical articles like which way the toilet paper goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation

Something I recently became aware of is that in some cases toilet paper orientation preference may be due to left handedness vs right handedness. I am right handed and prefer to have the paper oriented over itself. A member of my family is left handed and prefers to have the paper under itself. She once said that for her, with left handedness, having the paper under itself makes it easier to grab.