but it is not succinctly summarized for consumption, and that is the function Wikipedia fulfills for most users

You may have noticed that this is precisely what I’ve disagreed on with two other users in this thread, who claimed that Wikipedia should contain as much information as possible. I agree with you, it is good to have an encyclopedia that summarises the most important, and directs towards further materials for further deeper study.

Again, the point I disagreed on with the other poster is simply on what’s the “biggest repository of human knowledge ever”. You seem to agree that the shadow libraries are bigger, and that settles it, we don’t have to disagree further. Being the biggest repository does not, of course, mean that it should be the only repository, that others are bad, or whatever else. Different repositories can fulfill different roles in the sharing of knowledge.

I can understand the pitfalls of allowing updates from the public, but I think it’s widely accepted that Wikipedia does more good than bad.

I don’t think I disagreed with the latter point, except when I mentioned the smaller borderline fascist wikis somewhere ITT. When it comes to English and some other large WPs I definitely don’t disagree.

Maybe you’re just supposing that we disagree on something when we really don’t, so you can’t lead the discussion to the point where we’d finally clearly disagree. I provided some criticism of Wikipedia, that doesn’t mean I think it’s bad wholesale. Wikipedia is complicated. I’ve spent quite a while editing it, as well as using traditional encyclopedias. I just negatively reacted to some comments in this thread, the harsh dismissal of traditional encyclopedias, and the somewhat overrated view of Wikipedia.

“free” library

Pirate library. I don’t think this aspect has to be downplayed.

I can find José Saramago books there, but no info on the author himself.

You can find his biographies, criticism, analyses, the very sources that Wikipedia is using.

They don’t serve the same purpose, correct. But as far “repositories of knowledge” go (the phrase that kicked off this sub-discussion), they count as such, and they are massive, I have no doubt they’re bigger than WP. English Wikipedia has 7 million articles while Anna’s Archive (which mirrors Libgen and a big part of Internet Archive - but far from all of it!) says it has 70 million books and 200 million articles. Cut the number in half, or even in third due to duplicates if you want, to get a more realistic number, it’s still bigger.

Have you actually ever used Libgen and Internet Archive (its book collection specifically)?

That’s not really in agreement with your understanding of the encyclopedias either, I’d say. Encyclopedias contain [an unspecified amount of] information on all branches of knowledge. The branches are all of them, yes, but the exact amount of information provided from each subtopic of each branch is not necessarily endless. As the quoted “pillar” says.

Made them free to access and download, if the book is in the public domain or under a Creative Commons license. Allowed limited access if copyrighted (through some weirdly legal solution where they technically “loan” the book to you while you view it in your browser), although that option has been partly limited in the recent years due to lawsuits by book publishers.

https://archive.org/details/texts

I’ll never try to clarify anything for you again,

As if you tried to clarify anything up until this point anyway 🤣

but not for an encyclopedia, which is, by definition, literally supposed to contain all knowledge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia#Etymology

The word encyclopedia comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία,[13] transliterated enkúklios paideía ‘general education’, from enkúklios (ἐγκύκλιος) ‘circular, recurrent, required regularly, general’[5][14] and paideía (παιδεία) ‘education, rearing of a child’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.

(emphasis mine)

We have limited time in our lives. “Everything” can be the goal of a library collection. An encyclopedia gets the important gist of the “everything” in a practically readable and understandable format, and directs you to other places where you can learn more if needed. A balance has to be struck. Sadly, I guess Wikipedia has become a symbol of all knowledge on the web, since most other places are so dogshit and uninformative, that we can now expect or demand it to do beyond what an encyclopedia should normally do.

With no context I didn’t know what you might have meant by “duplicative information”. Now it makes sense, apparently you think Internet Archive is just Wayback Machine, with its archived duplicate Pokemon websites. Which is comically false, try to dial down your arrogance. Perhaps you could have asked questions about whether I really think Internet Archive’s collection of Pokemon sites contains more knowledge than Wikipedia, or maybe something else:

As of July 2013, the Internet Archive was operating 33 scanning centers in five countries, digitizing about 1,000 books a day for a total of more than 2 million books, in a total collection of 4.4 million books – including material digitized by others and fed into the Internet Archive

It isn’t. Yes, political control exists and has shaped encyclopedias (it has also shaped Wikipedia). The editorship however mainly has to focus on keeping stuff consistent and meaningful for the reader. You have to have no real involvment with scholarly writing if you think just letting random scholars write whatever they think is important will lead to a good encyclopedia.

To put it more concretely, I’ve read extensive editorial notes by the editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia from 1950s/60s, i.e. a govt project in an authoritarian country - the editor was an avowed Marxist and it was no secret, yet his notes were absolutely leading the project in the right direction, he was insistent on critically revising the inherited nationalist political narratives, pruning lots of rhetorical fluff and nonsense, “saying it like it is”. It had its bias (pro-Yugoslavian, pro-communist), and it was pretty clear about it, you know where to expect it if you don’t like it, and frankly the critical stance was justified. The second edition from 1980s actually caused controversies because lots of powerful people disliked it interfering with their own nationalist narratives. Even in an authoritarian country you can’t keep everything under control. The encyclopedia is to this day a treasure trove of valuable information that the existing Wikipedias of ex-Yugoslavian countries can only lick the balls of (in part because they are or have until recently been managed by illiterate fascists, as is the case for Croatian and Serbian WPs).

I certainly ignored “duplicative information”, because I don’t even know what those words are supposed to mean.

You haven’t asked any questions either, you made up a claim and are now seemingly very insulted when an obvious correction is pointed out. Those two sites contain hundreds upon hundreds of thosands of entire books, entire encyclopedias, and god knows how many scientific articles, inevitably way more stuff than Wikipedia. Every Wikipedia editor should have them open in a tab while editing ready to verify the existing sources and look for new ones.

It’s the biggest repository of human knowledge ever

Internet Archive and Libgen are incomparably bigger.

I doubt the number of errors is significantly different. The horrible mistakes I’ve had to correct on WP suggest otherwise, even if that’s just anecdotal.

Sometimes, less is more. I don’t think we really need trivia from the film set of the Infinity War or whatever. Selecting the most relevant material is an art in itself. A scholarly monograph might be used to dump info; an encyclopedia has to make sense of it for the layman.

Up to date, mostly yes (unless the editors get their info from outdated sources, which does happen), and accessible, definitely.

Being written by professionals, each article written by a single person with an editor controlling their work – these two things lead to far better written text, more consistently organised material cross-article, with a good selection of the most relevant information in each article. Wikipedia is amateurs dumping all sorts of info (which they don’t always even understand properly) that they come across elsewhere online onto the site, and even the “deletionists” can’t really contain this tendency. Carefully written articles with a head and tail are rare and largely products of individuals who really know their shit, but that meticulous type of work is inevitably diluted in the overall landscape of the site.

Note: I’m a fairly regular Wikipedia editor. It’s useful and fun.* But when I need some non-trivial info in fields I’m somewhat adept in, I prefer skipping Wikipedia.

* Although WP in some smaller languages isn’t, some versions are actively harmful due to the amount of misinformation or propaganda, and I would vote for deleting them entirely, including my own contributions. I don’t think there’s any print encyclopedia so hopelessly bad that I’d throw it into the fire. But this is kind of outside the frame of discussion, I admit.

That reason is correct, though.

Yes, the readership is not doing well. It won’t go away any time soon, but one day it might end up a ghost town. If everything develops linearly, which it might not.

https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-decline-by-topic/

Do you mean print encyclopedias? If so, heavy disagree.

The way it’s usually treated by laymen, as here, Sapir-Whorf theory is pseudoscience, and you’re not even really talking about language but about information. As for Wittgenstein, you’re grossly banalising his work.

This is not even hidden

Yeah. Really makes you think…

It’s notable if there are reliable sources about it. If there are no reliable sources about it, you wouldn’t be able to write much about the topic anyway. Unless you conduct your original research.

Had that one in mind myself. I wanted to post a thread when Xcancel/Nitter shut down for good (it was initially announced they would close it due to being sued by Twitter, then they reopened for a few days, and closed again). There was no news articles about it at the time, so there was nothing to link to, even though many users would find it worth knowing about.

In general I suspect that community is undermoderated.

That’s nothing unusual for a user who excused pedophilia and posted a fascist dogwhistle.