Wikipedia is getting pretty good lately

Maybe I am biased, but I am pleasantly surprised by Wikipedia recently. There is a lot of material coming, at least on the subjects that interest me (I don't know, reading about coffee, tea, scientology, estimation theory, neural networks, anything). An interesting side effect is that I don't buy books anymore on subjects I can read about on wikipedia.

Another thing that caught me by surprise - I rediscovered the pleasure to learn. Now I can go and learn about all these math theories that I skipped in college (because I was always busy typing on those Unix boxes).

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2006
  The best wikipedia articles are the ones on non-obscure topics. Whenever you start getting into articles that are more obscure, the liklihood of getting completely erroneous data seems to increase, BOCTAOE.
  
  Of course, this is just my opinion.
• Anonymous
  April 11, 2006
  Have to agree with Timothy. The closer you move to mainstream topics, the higher a risk you run.
  
  One tip is to check out the discussion page to see the flow of chatter that went behind creating the content. Any stuff like "...somebody vandalized this page, reverting to previous version..." should warn you that you're on risky ground!
• Anonymous
  April 11, 2006
  It’s defiantly an excellent resource ... and surprisingly accurate! I was reading in the Economist last week that a report published in Nature had found it only slightly less accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
  However Britannica were less than happy with the study ….
  
  http://corporate.britannica.com/press/releases/nature.html
• Anonymous
  April 11, 2006
  It’s defiantly an excellent resource ... and surprisingly accurate! I was reading in the Economist last week that a report published in Nature had found it only slightly less accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
  However Britannica were less than happy with the study ….
  
  http://corporate.britannica.com/press/releases/nature.html