[Qcombinator]

Wikipedia should never have existed.

Encyclopedias exist to provide (a) access to information, (b) organisation, and (c) some guarantee of expertise. It's easy to take for granted how amazing it is to have a world of information at our fingertips, but the Internet itself provides greater access to more information than any encyclopedia ever could. (And of course Wikipedia deliberately eschews original content anyway.) We already have tools to organise and find information on the Internet: it's called Google. Or DuckDuckGo. Or etc. How much authority an encyclopedia has depends on how much you trust its editors to be, or be able to find, experts in the relevant subject matter. A search engine doesn't provide any guarantee of accuracy in its results, but then neither does Wikipedia — most people point out that it's up to you to follow the references and evaluate them. The things Wikipedia is good at are the things that the Internet itself is good at; and the things that the Internet on its own is bad at (e.g. vetting accuracy) is not something that can really be fixed short of turning into Britannica Online.

It's not quite that simple, of course. In theory, anyone can throw up a webpage on hemovanadin for the world to see, and it is relatively easy to do so, but it could be easier. What isn't so easy is collaborating — Wikipedia's greatest strength is also its Achilles' heel: anyone from anywhere in the world can contribute, constructively or destructively. But easier collaboration is a technical issue. There's no reason in principle that a centralised body should be required to manage all that. It's just that the availability and user-friendliness of the necessary software currently provide too much friction to ignore.

[exception_e]

The thing that makes Wikipedia so special is the fact that the community strives to follow the guidelines they have set forth:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold

I'm not saying that every Wikipedia article adheres to them, but generally speaking, the quality is good and bias is severely frowned upon. "Random" web pages on any given topic miss out on these guidelines and are generally non-collaborative.

Full disclosure: I'm a big fan/consumer of Wikipedia... absolutely love the philosophy behind it.

[vacri]

The internet is very bad at providing clear, concise, and readable information, all without flashing ads at the user. Wikipedia is good at that bit. Britannica is, oddly, not good at that - it's a visually busy site and it's slow to navigate around.

Also, the "Britannica is more accurate than Wikipedia" comment is a canard, and has been proven wrong in the past. Google 'wikipedia britannica errors' and you'll find a number of study results that have one or the other slightly ahead, or rate them similarly. It's just not true that Britannica is more accurate than Wikipedia, not to any notable degree.