Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by end_of_line 1342 days ago
The owner of the site can remove content even from the web archive. It's far harder to remove books with isbns from national libraries.
1 comments
throwaway09223 1342 days ago
Wikipedia has book citations, and more and better book citations than traditional encyclopedias.

It's unclear what your point is. Are you suggesting wikipedia shouldn't also have citations to content published online, simply because it might be removed?

link
end_of_line 1342 days ago
Most wikipedia citations are linked to some news articles (this is not too bad, still newspapers are being archived) and some random internet blog articles of some random people which show up and disappear. Source creditworthness analysis? Good joke Wikipedia says :-) At best you can get some people's opinion about something.
link
throwaway09223 1341 days ago
That's a very silly take and is easily disproven. For example, pick any science topic at random. Let's look at Quantum Mechanics:

There are 81 citations. Of these, only 9 are not citing published books with an ISBN, or articles published in journals.

4 are citations to papers or articles published by physics professors on their university websites (Berkeley, Riverside, CUNY, Caltech)

Three are links to magazines: Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Physics World

The remaining two are a link to the Nobel Foundation (regarding a nobel prize award) and a link to Merriam-Webster for a definition of "Quantum."

> At best you can get some people's opinion about something.

Nah, not even close.

link
end_of_line 1341 days ago
And this is cherry picking. As studies show the quality varies strongly for historical, politically controversial and highly scientifical topics ( only few wikipedia editors ). Link https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3178876.3186132#BibP... So nothing "easily disproven"
link
throwaway09223 1341 days ago
No, it's a counter-example which unequivocally disproves your inaccurate generalization.

Cherry picking can only occur if I'm generalizing, and I am not. Counter-examples aren't cherry-picking.

Your statement "At best you can get some people's opinion about something" has been disproven.

link
end_of_line 1340 days ago
My thesis was "you can't take Wikipedia quality for granted" it fails to be objective on many topics. And your thesis is? Your counter thesis?
link