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A comment on Non-Consensual Personalization. Parent comment

Re:Non-Consensual Personalization by wongarsu on Friday February 04, 2022 @08:11AM (#30206349)
The Encarta version is much better if you want to learn about Plato, while Wikipedia makes it much easier to learn about thing related to Plato.

The notion that the relation to other things is at least as important as the thing itself permeates Wikipedia. Many smaller articles, like e.g. Differentiable Programming [1] probably link to more topics than the article itself has words.

I think a "stripped down" Wikipedia is an experiment worth trying, but it would serve a subtly different purpose, with some use cases being left behind and some being better served.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_programming

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Re:Non-Consensual Personalization by spookybones on Friday February 04, 2022 @08:34AM (#30206563)
I read something once that when you come across a link, your mind subconsciously hesitates whether or not to open it and that these thoughts detract from your focus on the material at hand.

I often wonder if it would be more beneficial for websites to transition to footnotes with all pertinent links at the bottom of the page.

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Re:Non-Consensual Personalization by marginalia_nu on Friday February 04, 2022 @08:26AM (#30206485)
I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

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Re:Non-Consensual Personalization by tablespoon on Friday February 04, 2022 @11:46AM (#30209181)
> I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

> I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

I think what this thread is missing is that Encarta and Wikipedia are vastly different products. If Wikipedia had multiple views for different needs it would literally die, because it's community edited. If its UI encouraged staying withing a narrow lane, then it would have even more problems with getting readers to cross over to being editors.

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