enjoying Wikipedia

July 28, 2009 4:22 AM

Best of Wikipedia: A twice-daily updated collection of some of the best reading on Wikipedia. Created and maintained by avinash.vora.
posted by nickyskye (15 comments total)

Practice is usually required to induce gleeking consistently

Well, there goes the rest of today.
posted by permafrost at 4:42 AM on July 28, 2009

One of the nice things about a paper copy of an encyclopedia was flicking through till you spotted something interesting. Following links in wikipedia didn't quite get there. This does. Nice.
posted by bystander at 4:54 AM on July 28, 2009 [2 favorites]

See also
posted by Mwongozi at 4:55 AM on July 28, 2009

I like! I want to know more about Room 39.
posted by molecicco at 4:55 AM on July 28, 2009 [1 favorite]

This is perfect. Thanks.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:30 AM on July 28, 2009

"some of the best reading on Wikipedia"...

The links I've followed are to articles that are obscure in subject matter. This is not the same as "good reading" and certainly not "best reading", especially when the article linked to is only a paragraph long.

It's easy to link to obscure articles. Finding the well-compiled ones that make genuinely good reading would be rather more time consuming. They are out there, but I'm not sure this site is finding them.
posted by nthdegx at 6:02 AM on July 28, 2009

It's easy to link to obscure articles. Finding the well-compiled ones that make genuinely good reading would be rather more time consuming.

No kidding. I was just looking up "secant" this morning and the entry is pretty sparse and unhelpful. Of course, I could go research it and fill the article out to be good...

In fact, that gives me an idea. One could make a blog like this one, that's essentially a honeypot for pedants. "Here's a great article on X!" each post would say. Except the entry is only mediocre or has some slight errors. The pedants would feel compelled to fix the article, resulting in improvements.

The only hard part would be identifying the articles that need the fixing. One heuristic might be something like "is only read once a month and hasn't been edited in six months". Low-traffic means bit-rot in software, presumably something similar applies to encyclopediae.
posted by DU at 6:22 AM on July 28, 2009 [3 favorites]

Super, thank you.
posted by johnny novak at 6:55 AM on July 28, 2009

This is a link full of weird stuff on wikipedia. Who would have guessed that wikipedia would have a whole article on Rasputin's penis?
posted by I_pity_the_fool at 9:01 AM on July 28, 2009 [1 favorite]

As an admitted Wikipedian, I'm personally fond of lamest edit wars.
posted by msalt at 9:27 AM on July 28, 2009

I thought this was the best of Wikipedia.
posted by HumuloneRanger at 12:40 PM on July 28, 2009

Yeah, a lot of the posts are to subjects better covered by Damn Interesting.

This makes me want to start my own Interesting Stuff from Wikipedia feed based on articles I've edited that still need more work: a strange entrepreneur, unusually-shaped concrete blocks, the name for Thoreau's beard, "clan tags", stingray rawhide, etc.
posted by dreamyshade at 12:57 PM on July 28, 2009

I hate the fact that every detail of the Wikipedia entry about me is factually correct, but the pictures are terrible.
posted by twoleftfeet at 12:35 AM on July 29, 2009

self link: I have a blog with the same concept. Guess I'm not the first one to think of making a Greatest Hits for the site.
posted by ageispolis at 2:14 AM on July 29, 2009

Hm, interesting. It links to an article on July 3rd that I linked to on May 17. It was the very first article I linked to on my blog. It looks like the blog was created on June 6. Coincidence? Most definitely.
posted by ageispolis at 2:21 AM on July 29, 2009