"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 in…
> 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). Wikipe…
"And to take care of another utterly bizarre comment: Encylopedias are always, per defintion, also repositories of knowledge."
We should just accept wholescale editing and knowledge production when we personally agree with it? Otherwise its verboten? You are aware of "edit-a-thons"? Are these biased?
Why not just have an AI print all of the currently available information on a topic with minimised (not zero) biases?
If we lived in a utopia where wikipedia could randomly allocate tasks to a diverse group of expert level civilians and then aggregate these takes/edits into a full description of a topic I would agree with wikipedia maximalists. This does not happen and a bunch of bad or naive actors have reduced the quality.