Re:Wikipedia fails as an encyclopedia, to science’s detriment
by RadioactiveMan on Tuesday December 29, 2015 @06:57PM
(#10809896)
Try logging in to Wikipedia and enabling Hovercards[1] in the beta features. It creates a pop-up with a summary of linked pages when you hover over the link.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Preferenc...
Re:Wikipedia fails as an encyclopedia, to science’s detriment
by ethanbond on Tuesday December 29, 2015 @07:17PM
(#10809980)
Oh wow, awesome. I'll give that a shot!
Re:Wikipedia fails as an encyclopedia, to science’s detriment
by ivan_ah on Wednesday December 30, 2015 @01:36AM
(#10811061)
> Click ... to expand a sentence that fills its place syntactically and semantically!
proof of concept of something like what you're describing: http://www.telescopictext.org/text/pFjkqQY9bmfvQ (not the best example, but telescopictext is very cool)
If you mean general knowledge in the sense of "knowledge which is generally held," or even "knowledge which is generally accessible," then a general knowledge encyclopedia wouldn't be that useful, by definition, to most people.
Crucially, it would be useless to the people most likely to use an encyclopedia!
A general knowledge encyclopedia should aim to curate knowledge with no discrimination in terms of category. This is what Wikipedia is, and it's really good at it.
I think there is room for improvement in linking topics and subtopics, even potentially in-line within an article. See a word you don't understand? Click the "+" next to it to expand a sentence that fills its place syntactically and semantically!