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Barrin92today at 6:11 AM1 replyview on HN

>an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time

this isn't a meaningful criticism. An encyclopedia is a reference for established and public knowledge. It's by definition archaic, not an archive for whatever trends on social media, which seems to be the article's criterion for the relevance of Odin.

An encyclopedia shouldn't prioritize article creation, it should be restrictive about what it adds and make sure the content is long term relevant, accurate and sourced. If anything Wikipedia has already been way too lax with what it lets stand on the site. They should honestly do a big cleaning and remove more articles that barely cite any meaningful source or seem like they're self-promotion, because there's already too much of it.


Replies

mindcrimetoday at 7:53 AM

See, to me, you're just leaning into the outdated and archaic aspect of this. Sure, that's the way encyclopedia's have been for a long time. But none of that means that they need to continue to work the same way. Technologies change, times change, standards change.

And that said... this whole issue may become moot anyway. Perhaps LLM powered AI systems (or whatever comes after them) will take the place of Wikipedia for certain classes of queries, that one might want to conduct. Eg, if a person wants to know about Odin and ChatGPT or Gemini can tell them all about Odin, maybe it's less important that Odin have a dedicated Wikipedia page (note: just an example, I'm not trying to make any particular commentary on Odin per-se).