Wikipedia is Neither Free Nor an Encyclopedia
Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2022 2:20 am
Wikipedia prides itself on being a "free encyclopedia," yet it is neither of these things.
One. While it may seem nitpicky to fault Wikipedia on asking for donations, its doing so certainly precludes it from using the descriptor "free."
Public utilities are paid for by taxes and are thus not free, despite common misunderstanding. On the other hand, charity is free, as it is offered without expectation or request of reciprocity from those it benefits. NGOs do not donate food to starving people and then ask that some of them help fund this "free" service later; that would not actually be a free service.
Two. More egregious than the misusage of the word free is Wikipedia's false promise of providing encyclopedic knowledge.
Likely, in the inception of the Wikipedia project, there was an admirable desire to build an inexpensive, digital encyclopedia for everyone. Over time, however, as certain individuals became drawn to this project, the Free Encyclopedia instead fostered a circle-jerk culture for geeks and eggheads. No longer was the goal to provide people with knowledge, but to hoard information gluttonously.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia at all. To paraphrase the definition of encyclopedia from an actual encyclopedia, Britannica (which is also open access), a general encyclopedia provides a comprehensive summary of its entries. Wikipedia invariably fails at this.
In its "criticisms of Wikipedia" page, Wikipedia lists what it thinks are fair criticisms of its platform, one of which is "incompleteness." There are apparently too many stub articles. While that may arguably be true for a digital encyclopedia in the information age, it is not what makes Wikipedia incomprehensive. Wikipedia's problem is the opposite: it is tremendously, woefully bloated.
Articles on Wikipedia do not aim to present subjects in a comprehensive manner to individuals encountering these subjects for the first time. Instead, it aims for conciseness. "Purists" (pedants) suggest edits to phrases which make those phrases shorter through the use of more high-level language, and also harshly rebuke those who attempt to simplify information for a general audience, urging the importance of teaching information accurately over conveying information at all, analogous to teaching kindergarteners calculus in an attempt to explain the number line. That may sound like an exaggeration, but in Wikipedia's entry on number lines, after briefly summarizing their history, Wikipedia immediately segues into logarithmic algebra.
There is zero regard for the educational background of the reader.
I find the use of the word "autism" to explain undesirable, non-autistic behavior distasteful, and particularly distasteful how this is done on the Internet, but this must be said: Wikipedia's style of communication is what someone would expect from an antisocial manchild with Asperger's.
Articles on Wikipedia are written for people who already possess a firm grasp of the subject matter. They are written by and for these people, refined to take up as little bit space while conveying the most accurate information possible. Useful tools for conveying knowledge, such as analogies, are not only discouraged, but ridiculed as well, unless used popularly and notably, specifically by respected figures in whichever field the subject matter pertains to (if Richard Stallman thinks X is like B, a clause may be inserted referencing this; otherwise, state that X is X, and that X does things that X does in X ways).
This method of communicating facts is what I've begun conceptualizing as the "bad teacher" model. If you have poor handwriting, as I do, you may notice that you struggle to parse your own words when looking back on them years later, yet had no difficulty understanding them at the time they were written. Likewise, there is a way to communicate facts so that you yourself understand the higher level concepts they explain, but so that people who do not already understand those higher level concepts can not make sense of the facts and why the facts are being presented in the order observed.
For the pedants gazing upon a newly written article, there is orgasmic joy in seeing how accurate and concise everything is. They read the article and think to themselves, "How accurate and concise is everything here! Job well done," though perhaps less enthusiastic than that, and with less charisma. They fail to realize that the article they have worked on so hard does not effectively present information, that it merely lists information.
There are entire "chains" of impenetrable information lists on Wikipedia, which, if followed, will lead one through a recursive loop. Articles on Wikipedia are an exercise in kicking the can down the road -- one leaves defining things to another article, which, in turn, relies upon another article, and so on. For the writers, there is some kind of mental schema triggered by these information lists, calling to mind facts already memorized. But to equate reminding themselves of facts with teaching facts to others is a delusion. In their warped, autistic theory of mind, they believe that others are thinking what they themselves are thinking when reading these lists of information, and become frustrated with people who can not read minds. It is like someone devising his own acronym, not telling others what it means, and then acting incredulous when others request elaboration ("What? ABAVKADERAK. I said it. It's right there! ABAVKADERAK. What do you not understand?")
Wikipedia has become a specialist encyclopedia for everything, which presents a dilemma in linking disparate articles together: one needs to be a neuroscientist to gleam information from entries pertaining to the brain, and an engineer from entries pertaining to rockets, so where these two subjects overlap, or are linked together, as often happens on Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia can never serve as a useful tool for edification.
Wikipedia is a tool for AI to memorize facts. It is designed to educate Chinese Rooms that memorize information by downloading. This is reflected in the grammatical structure of articles, where there is very little of the time a clear antecedent, the nature of some information specialists being to not bother with grammatical precision, as grammar lies outside their area of nerdy expertise. So long as their mental schema is triggered by the words they write, and the right pattern of neurons pertaining to memorized facts synchronously fire, "comprehensivity" is considered achieved. This helps robots, but not people who want to use an encyclopedia to actually learn something.
The aforementioned bloat is not to be misconstrued as verbosity. To return to the other encyclopedia referenced in this little comparative analysis, Britannica is very erudite, has many complex sentences, employs specialist language, and abundantly uses multisyllabic words. You can practically hear David Attenborough narrating each entry. Despite this, it succeeds in being intelligible. Because of this, perhaps.
In contrast, Wikipedia's style guide is oppressively in-human. Sentences themselves are homogenized in an attempt to streamline article size and modularize information. Articles on people or places will always have the same sections which are presented in the same order, somewhat understandably, but then this spirit of information modularity and hoarding is also applied to botany, and then to history, and then to mathematics, and then every article seems more like a gigantic index of factoids no one queried, that no one person could possibly query, because no one person wants a spectroscopic analysis of blue morphos in the same span of time he wishes to access a listicle of "Notable people who have enjoyed blue morphos." Wikipedia is the McDonald's of encyclopedias.
In an attempt to reduce database size, Wikipedians shave off bits of information which are important in education (there is a reason the great teachers of ancient Greece employed a conversational communication method in teaching students, which often constituted chiastic structures similar to the redundancies of this write-up, where opinions are stated and then recursively stated again). Information on the Free Encyclopedia, in contrast, is presented in stochastic rapid-fire, devoid of context. People are left to figure out for themselves how the facts presented are related, or even how to understand the facts. By design, because this is seen as being more uniform.
There is no template or mental schema provided to make sense of how the facts are connected. Thousands of facts are stated in a single sentence, none being memorizable, because they fail to fit in with a broader understanding of the world. Wikipedia is a gigantic puzzle, tens of terabytes large, and to make sense of it, you need to memorize every last kilobyte.
Wikipedia articles are curt where they need to slow down and explain, and bloviating where a link to an index would suffice. This is ultimately why Wikipedia in the future will be written entirely in machine code. Future Wikipedians will be cyborgs, not sysops, who converse with eachother in binary statements of logic. It's the most correct way of communicating ideas. The purest, for the purest Free Encyclopedia.
One. While it may seem nitpicky to fault Wikipedia on asking for donations, its doing so certainly precludes it from using the descriptor "free."
Public utilities are paid for by taxes and are thus not free, despite common misunderstanding. On the other hand, charity is free, as it is offered without expectation or request of reciprocity from those it benefits. NGOs do not donate food to starving people and then ask that some of them help fund this "free" service later; that would not actually be a free service.
Two. More egregious than the misusage of the word free is Wikipedia's false promise of providing encyclopedic knowledge.
Likely, in the inception of the Wikipedia project, there was an admirable desire to build an inexpensive, digital encyclopedia for everyone. Over time, however, as certain individuals became drawn to this project, the Free Encyclopedia instead fostered a circle-jerk culture for geeks and eggheads. No longer was the goal to provide people with knowledge, but to hoard information gluttonously.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia at all. To paraphrase the definition of encyclopedia from an actual encyclopedia, Britannica (which is also open access), a general encyclopedia provides a comprehensive summary of its entries. Wikipedia invariably fails at this.
In its "criticisms of Wikipedia" page, Wikipedia lists what it thinks are fair criticisms of its platform, one of which is "incompleteness." There are apparently too many stub articles. While that may arguably be true for a digital encyclopedia in the information age, it is not what makes Wikipedia incomprehensive. Wikipedia's problem is the opposite: it is tremendously, woefully bloated.
Articles on Wikipedia do not aim to present subjects in a comprehensive manner to individuals encountering these subjects for the first time. Instead, it aims for conciseness. "Purists" (pedants) suggest edits to phrases which make those phrases shorter through the use of more high-level language, and also harshly rebuke those who attempt to simplify information for a general audience, urging the importance of teaching information accurately over conveying information at all, analogous to teaching kindergarteners calculus in an attempt to explain the number line. That may sound like an exaggeration, but in Wikipedia's entry on number lines, after briefly summarizing their history, Wikipedia immediately segues into logarithmic algebra.
There is zero regard for the educational background of the reader.
I find the use of the word "autism" to explain undesirable, non-autistic behavior distasteful, and particularly distasteful how this is done on the Internet, but this must be said: Wikipedia's style of communication is what someone would expect from an antisocial manchild with Asperger's.
Articles on Wikipedia are written for people who already possess a firm grasp of the subject matter. They are written by and for these people, refined to take up as little bit space while conveying the most accurate information possible. Useful tools for conveying knowledge, such as analogies, are not only discouraged, but ridiculed as well, unless used popularly and notably, specifically by respected figures in whichever field the subject matter pertains to (if Richard Stallman thinks X is like B, a clause may be inserted referencing this; otherwise, state that X is X, and that X does things that X does in X ways).
This method of communicating facts is what I've begun conceptualizing as the "bad teacher" model. If you have poor handwriting, as I do, you may notice that you struggle to parse your own words when looking back on them years later, yet had no difficulty understanding them at the time they were written. Likewise, there is a way to communicate facts so that you yourself understand the higher level concepts they explain, but so that people who do not already understand those higher level concepts can not make sense of the facts and why the facts are being presented in the order observed.
For the pedants gazing upon a newly written article, there is orgasmic joy in seeing how accurate and concise everything is. They read the article and think to themselves, "How accurate and concise is everything here! Job well done," though perhaps less enthusiastic than that, and with less charisma. They fail to realize that the article they have worked on so hard does not effectively present information, that it merely lists information.
There are entire "chains" of impenetrable information lists on Wikipedia, which, if followed, will lead one through a recursive loop. Articles on Wikipedia are an exercise in kicking the can down the road -- one leaves defining things to another article, which, in turn, relies upon another article, and so on. For the writers, there is some kind of mental schema triggered by these information lists, calling to mind facts already memorized. But to equate reminding themselves of facts with teaching facts to others is a delusion. In their warped, autistic theory of mind, they believe that others are thinking what they themselves are thinking when reading these lists of information, and become frustrated with people who can not read minds. It is like someone devising his own acronym, not telling others what it means, and then acting incredulous when others request elaboration ("What? ABAVKADERAK. I said it. It's right there! ABAVKADERAK. What do you not understand?")
Wikipedia has become a specialist encyclopedia for everything, which presents a dilemma in linking disparate articles together: one needs to be a neuroscientist to gleam information from entries pertaining to the brain, and an engineer from entries pertaining to rockets, so where these two subjects overlap, or are linked together, as often happens on Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia can never serve as a useful tool for edification.
Wikipedia is a tool for AI to memorize facts. It is designed to educate Chinese Rooms that memorize information by downloading. This is reflected in the grammatical structure of articles, where there is very little of the time a clear antecedent, the nature of some information specialists being to not bother with grammatical precision, as grammar lies outside their area of nerdy expertise. So long as their mental schema is triggered by the words they write, and the right pattern of neurons pertaining to memorized facts synchronously fire, "comprehensivity" is considered achieved. This helps robots, but not people who want to use an encyclopedia to actually learn something.
The aforementioned bloat is not to be misconstrued as verbosity. To return to the other encyclopedia referenced in this little comparative analysis, Britannica is very erudite, has many complex sentences, employs specialist language, and abundantly uses multisyllabic words. You can practically hear David Attenborough narrating each entry. Despite this, it succeeds in being intelligible. Because of this, perhaps.
In contrast, Wikipedia's style guide is oppressively in-human. Sentences themselves are homogenized in an attempt to streamline article size and modularize information. Articles on people or places will always have the same sections which are presented in the same order, somewhat understandably, but then this spirit of information modularity and hoarding is also applied to botany, and then to history, and then to mathematics, and then every article seems more like a gigantic index of factoids no one queried, that no one person could possibly query, because no one person wants a spectroscopic analysis of blue morphos in the same span of time he wishes to access a listicle of "Notable people who have enjoyed blue morphos." Wikipedia is the McDonald's of encyclopedias.
In an attempt to reduce database size, Wikipedians shave off bits of information which are important in education (there is a reason the great teachers of ancient Greece employed a conversational communication method in teaching students, which often constituted chiastic structures similar to the redundancies of this write-up, where opinions are stated and then recursively stated again). Information on the Free Encyclopedia, in contrast, is presented in stochastic rapid-fire, devoid of context. People are left to figure out for themselves how the facts presented are related, or even how to understand the facts. By design, because this is seen as being more uniform.
There is no template or mental schema provided to make sense of how the facts are connected. Thousands of facts are stated in a single sentence, none being memorizable, because they fail to fit in with a broader understanding of the world. Wikipedia is a gigantic puzzle, tens of terabytes large, and to make sense of it, you need to memorize every last kilobyte.
Wikipedia articles are curt where they need to slow down and explain, and bloviating where a link to an index would suffice. This is ultimately why Wikipedia in the future will be written entirely in machine code. Future Wikipedians will be cyborgs, not sysops, who converse with eachother in binary statements of logic. It's the most correct way of communicating ideas. The purest, for the purest Free Encyclopedia.