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This is going to be a very unpopular opinion, but I'm curious what folks think: I don't like Wikipedia. I think it's done more harm than good, I think the editing process is biased, skews to the political left or right (depending on the article), Wikipedia also generally skews secular and humanist (because that's the nature of most contributors). References constantly 404, but that's not even the main problem: references are not parsed properly. A lot of times, I'll look at a cited paper and its cited content will be diametrically opposed to what the Wiki page says. Controversial topics are nightmare, and contributing to them is even more of a nightmare. The voting process, by definition, is flawed -- and Wikipedia is very much a "tyranny by majority." The only articles that are high quality tend to be very technical ones (where you generally have professionals in the field contribute to non-controversial topics). Most rules -- like NOR, NPOV, and BLP, are implemented haphazardly. Why do I think Wikipedia has done more harm than good? Because there's a new phenomenon where one reads the Wiki page of a complex topic (say, something like Free Will) and 5 minutes later, the reader thinks they're a bonafide expert on a topic that has puzzled humanity for millennia. There's a reason Wikipedia can't be cited in college (heck, even high school) papers: it's low quality and unvetted. I make it a point to never cite Wikipedia in online discussion. I'd rather cite Wolfram Alpha, or a professor's personal webpage, or a specific paper. Even before Wikipedia, you had knowledge being disseminated via the web: philosophy professors had their own web-pages, theologians had their own web-pages, and particle physicists had their own web-pages -- all filled with morsels of specific (and often times technical) information. I really wish Encyclopaedia Britannica put more efforts into their own knowledge base, but I get it: high-quality vetted content is hard to do. Wikipedia takes shortcuts, and we'd be foolish to ignore its shortcomings. |
On the one hand, I don’t think Wikipedia has made people like me smarter. Maybe the opposite: for all the diversity of opinion I think there’s way more outright BS on Wikipedia than in, say, Brittanica.
On the other hand, I can imagine lots of people don’t have easy access to more “authoritative” sources. And I’ve certainly learned a little bit about a lot of things there.
In the middle, I guess, Wikipedia is a good place to start learning about something, but a terrible place to finish.
As to financing it, I’ve always held the unpopular position that they should run ads. It would be the perfect place to try privacy-respecting advertising.