Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nmrm 4356 days ago
> The same should be able to be said about everything on Wikipedia

I don't think so. Well-written encyclopedic entries are in far shorter supply than bare lists of facts.

I guess the fundamental difference of opinion is between those who feel Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and those who feel it's a dumping ground for human knowledge. Note that I'm not taking sides, just trying to explain the root causes for the difference of opinion.

Also, on a purely technical note, I very much doubt that you couldn't find the information in bot-generated articles anywhere else using a search engine. If that were the case, where are the bots getting the data?

1 comments

Bots could be concatenating two or threes different sets to create one stub per butterfly.

Or bots could be taking something in a weird set of scans, OCRing that, and then putting it in a stub. This would be troubling unless there was a human checking the quality of the OCR.

There is plenty of stuff that is public domain and not online in a useful form.