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0 pointsjacquesm11y ago0 comments

> Wikipedia at this point is one of the primary sources for everything on the internet.

That is explicitly what it isn't, anything but that.

> I can't comment exactly on the editor situation of the wiki, but it's to be expected a shift to more specialized and aggressive "curation" of articles, specially of more solidified topics. Wikipedia's fantastic performance contradicts this argument.

Wikipedia would still be a fantastic resource if nobody contributed to it from today forward. But that does not mean it couldn't be a whole lot better without the army of lawyer wannabes that are in a tug of war over who gets to have the most power over others by citing policies until the cows come home.

Lots of long time contributors have left because of this and the exodus is far from over. I agree that there is an expected shift to curation but the fantastic performance of wikipedia is not in any way evidence for there not being a significant negative undercurrent at work.

That's just evidence of how good the concept originally was and how much momentum it has built up.

Any kind of success will attract two kinds of people: those that wish to contribute and those that see it as a means to their personal ends, to get a piece of that success. Since wikipedia is not big on credit for contributions the only place where people craving for recognition get to achieve their fix is in becoming 'editors', and unfortunately the motivations of those editors are not always pure.

See elsewhere in this thread for some of the more bizarre displays of such behavior.

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threeseed11y ago

Google uses it for their semantic searches and Apple/Microsoft use it for their personal assistants. So this idea that Wikipedia isn't a primary source of information is nonsense. It is.

Until it stops being the first search result for the majority of "typical" searches it will remain a primary source of information.

dsrguru11y ago

I think you're confusing the parent's use of "primary" + "source" with the lexical item "primary source". The parent presumably meant "one of the most main sources [to use as one's only or first point of research]".

Sort of separately, but as threeseed points out, Wikipedia is frequently used as a corpus for primary research, so technically it's that kind of "primary source" too.

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