Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

I’d take the Wikipedia answer any day. Millions of eyes on each article vs. a black box with no eyes on the outputs.

Even Wikipedia is a problem though. There are so many pages now that self-reference is almost impossible to detect. Meaning, the citation of a statement made on Wikipedia that uses an outside article for reference, which is an article that was originally written using that very Wikipedia article as its own citation.

It's all about trust. Trust the expert, or the crowd, or the machine.

They're all able to be gamed.

False equivalence. "Nothing is perfectly unreliable, therefore everything is (broadly) unreliable, therefore everything is equally unreliable." No, some sources are substantially more reliable than others.

*perfectly reliable, but yes.

> "Millions of eyes on each article"

Only a minority of users contribute regularly (126,301 have edited in the last 30 days):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_o...

And there are 6,952,556 articles in the English Wikipedia, so an average article is corrected every 55 months (more than 4 years).

It's hardly "Millions of eyes on each article"

But of those 126,301 people who have edited in the last 30 days, some of them have edited more than one article. In fact, some have made up to millions of edits (lifetime), which disproportionately increases the total. At least 5000 people have edited more than 24,000 times.

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

(And also: each editor has (approximately) 2 eyes :) )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com