If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site
Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
While studying a neuroscience-adjacent MSc at UCL in London during the mid-2010s, senior academics would regularly recommend Wikipedia as an excellent primer for neuroanatomy. They wouldn't do it for people on actual neuroscience courses, who needed to know things in more detail, but they were very complimentary about the accuracy of the information on there.
I find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.
It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny.
Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive; but there are many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.
there are many math teachers teaching math to people who don't know the subject, basically all mathemeticians. and wikipedia has guidelines for how to serve the audience, the math articles ignore it.
I (got into and) went to MIT (and graduated several times) in engineering and also in finance. I am way beyond the average wikipedia reader in math knowledge. the mathematics wiki articles are imho worthless. the challenge is not how to write articles that are explanatory and reasonable, the challenge is all the gatekeeping of the wiki editors who make it the way it is, that is an unreasonable fight. I tried to make a change a couple of weeks ago to correct an error that was in an article. I got reverted by a person who wanted to collaborate on making the article more abstruse as a solution. "but the error" I said. It's still there.
The thing about Wikipedia is that no one cares what you have done outside Wikipedia. It is like showing up at a new work place and saying something that is factually correct, it can go any way.
I have a fair amount of edits on Wikipedia and the wikis that preceded it. Whenever I read this sentiment here I never really understand what the problem is. I never have it myself. The only fight I have been involved in was if Wikipedia should have an article on Bitcoin. Which was not obvious in the beginning.
You could always link to the article and we can have a look. I have no clout on Wikipedia but I do understand why facts can be problematic in any text book. It once took me a week to correct an article about a Russian author.
I'd say there's significantly less gatekeeping on Wikipedia than most parts in academia. YMMV.
But: there are a bunch of random clueless people trying to promote their obscure papers to boost their citation counts, push weird nationalist POVs, add fringe pseudoscience, make "fixes" that turn out to be wrong, add vague explanations which they find personally helpful but nobody else can make sense of, remove clarifications and explanations in the name of rigorous purity, change the wording of sentences that have been subject of years-long dispute and careful compromise, and so on. Wikipedia maintainers are constantly fighting against these agents of entropy (or when an article is not actively maintained, it tends to get a lot worse over time), which unfortunately can sometimes also negatively color interactions with helpful contributors. They're also part-time volunteers, and fallible humans; try to cut them some slack.
To the extent that there is "gatekeeping", it is mostly along the lines of: you can't use Wikipedia primarily for self promotion, you can't add your own new claims that have no published source, and you have to abide by existing norms of project/community engagement. In general, people are judged by their contributions and behavior, not their credentials (though editors also include a bunch of world-class experts in the topics they contribute about, and it does have some pull when someone can say "I literally wrote the top cited paper about this" or whatever).
But beyond that, the difficulty is that there's no one correct way to explain difficult topics, no single audience for Wikipedia articles, a lot of strong opinions about how things should be one way or the other. Trying to satisfy everyone takes discussion and compromise and sometimes a minority is still unhappy with the resolution. The biggest problem though is that there are not enough active participants (including in mathematics) to write great articles about every topic, and writing a really excellent article about something takes a huge amount of work; there are many mediocre articles that have never really had the time put in to make them great.
When someone new to the project gets into a heated dispute about a minor point, they routinely get extremely frustrated and occasionally then run around the web complaining about how awful the people on Wikipedia are. Several times times in the past few years I have asked such complainers for specifics, and remarkably I have gotten a reply ~4 times. In all but one case, when I went to investigate further it turned out that they were clearly in the wrong. In the last example there was a misunderstanding and I fixed the issue. If you want to provide a specific article and error, I'm happy to go take a look.
Alternately, when people run into an unresolvable dispute on one local article talk page, they can seek opinions from wider groups of Wikipedia editors, e.g. on the math "wikiproject" talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mat.... If you make a post there about your issue, you will get more eyes on your problem, and it will likely be resolved correctly.
Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don’t kill me if now is much better, because is just an example from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into the article, and instead of starting with something lime “helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos”, started with “the forier transform is defined as (PUM the integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to show the integral converges according to xxx criterion, as long as the function is…” you get the idea. Had I not know what FT is, I would’ve not undestand anything
Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology related. Also for example, in Spanish, don’t ask me why, any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific name, and you have to search the whole article to find the “common” name of the thing.
The articles about Fourier series and Fourier transform currently begin with:
> A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric series. By expressing a function as a sum of sines and cosines, many problems involving the function become easier to analyze because trigonometric functions are well understood.
and
> In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input, and outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the transform is a complex valued function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers to both the mathematical operation and to this complex-valued function. When a distinction needs to be made, the output of the operation is sometimes called the frequency domain representation of the original function. The Fourier transform is analogous to decomposing the sound of a musical chord into the intensities of its constituent pitches.
That is much more as it used to be in english. Anyway I stated clearly, it was a time ago, and now may be better, that it was just an example. In german is still shooting mathematical symbols that anybody who does not already know what FT is, will 99% not even start to understand what is it about.
The only way anything ever changes in a volunteer project is if someone feels motivated and makes the effort. Please contribute changes to German Wikipedia articles (or English ones) when you notice possible improvements. If you are not personally capable of improving an article about a topic you don't know about, please try to contribute to the articles about topics you do know something about. Or you can try to leave a talk page message asking for help.
I find it the other way around. I remember vividly that the textbook I was using for proving Gödel's first incompleteness theorem was insufferable and dense. Wikipedia gave a nice and more easily understood proof sketch. Pedagogically it’s better to provide a proof sketch for students to turn it into a full proof anyways.
To give a different opinion, the math topics are actually what I like most. When I'm looking for something on Wikipedia, I want to get a precise definition and related concepts. I don't think it's Wikipedia's job to teach me the material, there's other resources for that.
The introductory paragraph in Simple English is: 'A diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is a re-arrangement of carbon atoms (those are called allotropes).' Seriously?
Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a number of important industrial applications.'
Britannica concisely summarizes the basic knowledge about diamonds in an easy-to-read short paragraph.
The thing is - Britannica is a lot smaller. Also - wikipedia is updated almost immediately for significant events where Brittanica would only be updated sometimes.
Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.
I prefer the real encyclopedias. Britannica or other. The quality was so much better. For me would be hard to believe, anybody with actual experience using britannica can prefer wiki from the explanation quality pov. Of course the wiki has many advantages too. Before LLM I used it for helping with translation, for example. The direct links to web resources, etc. I like having both. I do certainly not want a world where wikipedia has the monopoly of truth, or truth is something “democratic” please understand it correctly, democracy is good, just that in knowledge I’ve seen so often the most popular belief is sometimes wrong.
I'm reading the Diamond article you liked and I cannot understand for the lift of me what you wanted? The Brittanica article seems substantially poorer. Note also that a key feature of Wikipedia is the hyperlinks! If you don't know what a "crystalline structure" is, or you want to know more about "hardness", you're welcome to click the links and dive further!
The wikipedia is more information dense, but that's not always what I want in a general purpose reference. Also hyperlinks are good if you want to read the article. But I don't want to have to click through hyperlinks, and thereby lose focus. Sometimes I just want to know just enough to complete the context in which some thing was mentioned. In the opening sentence there's a whole phrase "solid form of the element carbon" hyperlinked - to what is not immediately clear - but curiosity peaks the mind and I see that it's to an article on carbon allotropes. Later on it says it's "metastable" so I need to know what that means, but it just links to an article that's equally obstruse and so I have to go on an endless rabbit hole of hyperlinks. Britannica usually explains briefly in parentheses what some piece of jargon means.
Let me point out, that for me personally, for many years, hyperlinks in Wikipedia were the worst feature. I hated that! Anytime I started looking for something, I would start following links ad infinitum. Was extremely distracting. Instead of a little inline definition, for everything is a link. There is a good balance between linking to the definition of each word, and just inlining the definition.
Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.
If the choice is between Wikipedia vs random information accross the web, then Wikipedia is undoubtedly better. But it doesn't have to be that, on many topics there are reputable sources to consult first.
There is very little "random information" on the internet which you can find easily anymore. The blogosphere is cordoned off by search engines as are personal websites most of the time.
Most academic papers are behind paywalls now. Which is maybe just as well given AI scraping.
Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go