Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BrainVirus 1421 days ago
Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale. It's broken on every conceivable level, and yet people stubbornly cling to the myth that was formed around it circa 2005.

Instead of being surprised at things over and over again, I think it's time to adjust our collective expectations to match the reality.
3 comments
themodelplumber 1421 days ago
All models are broken, some are useful... Wikipedia works really, really well at specific points of leverage. It can change over time but the most likely-successful change will still center on building from leverage points outward.
link
mhh__ 1421 days ago
> It's broken on every conceivable level

And yet it's still really good.

People like Larry Sanger prattle on about how awful wikipedia is (and make multiple websites for collecting mistakes, which mostly seem to be blank), rarely with any concrete evidence. In fact Sanger in particular refuses to browse wikipedia at all - except that he does but through a proxy, because giving wikipedia.org traffic is "icky". I pointed out that this is childish behaviour and he blocked me, go figure.

link
hombre_fatal 1421 days ago
As many problems as Wikipedia has, and it surely has them, it's amazing how useful it remains despite those problems, and it's the only thing we have like it.

Stack Overflow is similar: you can make it look pretty bad case by case, yet it's an unchallenged best of breed despite its warts.

Maybe there's no perfect way to run these massive operations just like there is no clean, pretty answer to "should this article exist?" no matter where you set the bar.

link
CharlesW 1421 days ago
> Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale.

"Decentralized" <> "unmoderated", "without content standards", or "without editors". Is there a more decentralized knowledge resource of general significance? Hosting happens to be centralized, only because nobody else cares enough to rehost it themselves (which the license allows you to do).

link