[willdr]

Encyclopedias are not designed to report on pop culture. The entire nature of an encyclopedia is to be downstream of good secondary sources, ideally academic, and summarise what those good secondary sources have said about specific topics.

Side note, it is very funny that the same people lamenting the state of Wikipedia seem to be desperate to have their topic included on it. If the site sucks, why care about it so much?

[lerno]

It's funny. Today people say that of Wikipedia, as if it was trustworthy. But it used to be common knowledge to just "don't trust anything on Wikipedia". Wikipedia was never like a regular encyclopedia, it just wanted to be one.

Its biggest advantage over traditional encyclopedias was its breadth and how quickly it could be updated. The trade-off was that articles could vary greatly in quality and could be edited by anyone, making accuracy less consistent than in traditionally edited reference works. So the effort to reduce breadth and say it shouldn't be updated quick... that's just strikes me (as someone fairly old) as kind of funny.

[shash]

TBH, "Don't trust anything on Wikipedia" was always just stuck up posturing. Plenty of badly sourced, badly edited and biased articles in regular encyclopedias too, but because Wikipedia is contributed to by the unwashed masses, don't trust it.

"Don't use Wiki as a primary source" is much more to the point - it's not meant to be. Use it to find the primaries.

Also, I don't see this as "reducing breadth" so much as attempting to hold to a minimum standard of "has this been written up anywhere by someone other than the people who started it?" which isn't perfect, but it's been the stance since the beginning.

[lerno]

Early days of Wikipedia was the wild west. Surely you must agree to that.

[shash]

Of course. But,

1. So are most other encyclopaedias, and most don’t even give you references or citations for an article 2. We are literally decades from that point now. Surely you must agree that times have changed.

[rq1]

Because it’s supposedly open?

[cygx]

When open online spaces gain popularity, the threat of devolving into a cesspool of bigotry and misinformation rears its head. Sadly, moderation isn't optional.

But how do you moderate? Do you establish your own ministry of truth? Only allow contributors with a university email address (shoutout to the arXiv)?

Wikipedia decided to externalize part of the vetting process by placing formal restrictions on the sources you're allowed to collect information from.

Sadly, there currently aren't any such sources for Odin.