Sometimes it's nice to get information as written by another person. Maybe the author didn't like the way Wikipedia presented the information, maybe they thought it was overly verbose, maybe they just wanted to warm people into the idea of programming languages before getting into the other articles. We're people, not robots. Expression through writing, even if it is "re-inventing" existing information, is not a bad thing. Not to mention, they had an entire article dedicated to the personal opinions of various people in the industry and how the languages they use affect their businesses. That's not something you should expect to get from Wikipedia.

> it's filled with people re-inventing things that need not be re-invented

In parallel, there's a ton of legacy stuff that needs to be re-invented [1], but people are too caught up developing the umpteenth MVC framework for Javascript.

[1] I don't mean shitty reinventions where a lot of time and effort is wasted rediscovering the reasons for why the original system wasn't so bad after all.

Well, I am hopeful that it is at least in some cases, simply ignorance.

I've re-written existing projects, as a personal learning experience. I've written out my thoughts on computer science, people, life, etc. I just didn't go publishing it on HackerNews, or thought it was worthy of anyone else's time.

I don't necessarily agree with you that things need re-invention as it stands. I think it'd really help to gain some clarity on what it is we're trying to accomplish in the first place, before we go off doing. What are we trying to do here really and why? If we asked that question for one minute, perhaps we'd not have top engineers at places like Facebook, perfecting newsfeed spam algorithms. We'd perhaps rethink things for one minute and realize oh wait, we can change the world instead. I don't know, I'm a dreamer, maaan :)

Measure twice, cut once - I see computer science as a field of people running around with scissors, not entirely sure what scissors are good for, just knowing they're getting paid good money to cut by following StackOverflow cutting manuals, or if they think they're fancy, by reading 'category theory' and coming up wth libraries with 0 documentation that no one can use without also thinking they're fancy, and reading category theory, sigh :)