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by knowuh 2954 days ago
Thanks to pedantic rules, Wikipedia and StackOverflow are the two most useful sites online right now.
4 comments

Wikipedia is a lot better now, but any site that has hundreds of thousands of words of discussion over which dash to use and when is obviously toxic.

Here is an n-dash, an m-dash, and a hyphen. –,—,-

We expect discussions about wars to be tricky, but we don't expect discussion about the punctuation used in titles to be so hard: Read the "Mexican–American War" / "Mexican—American War" discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...

Here's several thousand words of discussion. (Closed with no consensus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...

Look at the word counts for these meta discussions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...

Dashes and hyphens made it to Arbcom (this also has links to various Ani threads): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...

Until you try to correct simple mistakes on Wikipedia a couple of times, and learn that you should just give up, and accept things like broken grammar, repeated sentence fragments, etc.

I believe they are surfing on the strength of past contributions, and very dedicated in-group contributors, not by harnessing the world.

> Until you try to correct simple mistakes on Wikipedia a couple of times, and learn that you should just give up, and accept things like broken grammar, repeated sentence fragments, etc.

Counter-example: 99% of my Wikipedia activity is fixing typos here and there and I never got any issue.

Wikipedia is useful, no denying that.

StackOverflow might as well just be put into read-only mode at this point. Asking new questions is more likely than not going to end up with your question locked for some reason. It's a super useful archive of questions and answers from back in the day when they still let people ask questions, but as far as I can tell no new useful content is being added. A few of the stack exchange sites are still allowing questions, but on the programming one the "ask a question" button is just a decoy.

Indeed. Say what you want about the bar for contribution, but those sites rarely disappoint me when I visit.