No Wikipedia

This forum would be very, very, very empty because it would be hard to figure out what other people were talking about unless you already knew or did some research, ie. all the random WIs about Heirs surviving, Royal Marriages, ect.
 
Whaaat?
There's plenty of info on the web, google it.

Wikipedia is a nice, concise source. A one-stop shop.

Compare going to Wikipedia with going to Wal Mart instead of the Gap, Game Stop, Kroger, and WaldenBooks.

For me, it would have made researching for my HP projects (both Harry Potter stuff and British history and culture in general) that much more difficult, as well as research for my original work.

(I did some research for my Afghanistan-set horror story "Djinn" on Wiki last night)
 

Xen

Banned
And for the most part Wikipedia is more than less accurate, its not 100% but nothing ever is, I repeat, nothing. Alot of anti-Wikipedians are such because Wikipedia does not always support their opinions or the opinions of authors who wrote books backing up their opinions. A perfect case in point is Conservapedia.

Without Wikipedia something else takes its place, its not too difficult to imagine another free online encyclopedia being on line, though it is likely to be less up to date.
 
For readily identifiable facts Wiki is great, it's on commentary of contentious issues that it falls down. But when you aren't preparing a crucial research paper for uni or work Wiki does the job in plenty of circumstances.

I just looked up Libyan railway history on Wiki, secure in the knowledge that some obsessed trainspotter had obsessively pored over every detail before putting it up.
 
Compare going to Wikipedia with going to Wal Mart instead of the Gap, Game Stop, Kroger, and WaldenBooks.

Good analogy, Wal Mart basically destroyed the commercial chances of your other examples.

I should hope that Wikipedia never is cited as a primary source of information. It doesn't have the gravitas of the Encyclopedia Britannica or the World Book - or any other encyclopedia.

The only thing setting Wikipedia apart from another online encyclopedia is the ability of user to edit and create content. That it is free is something I would consider seperate. Without Wikipedia we would be having our annual subscriptions to various online encyclopedias.
 
Arguably it's way better than Britannica, but only just. It certainly covers a lot more topics in a lot more detail and with a fair bit more accuracy for the less common topics.

However, with more rules and oversight (an undeniable trend), established authors with strong PoVs will dominate and become harder and harder to challenge them. Dissenting authors will increasingly get banned, and it will become a sopabox for those who had the most political savvy and stamina in the first decade of its existence.

Just look at anything related to Eastern European history. The trend is very clear there.
 
Wiki is like the blogosphere, you probably have to retard the Internet at something less than its 2.0 version to stop it from arising (though I wonder if the anti-page-link software deployed by controversial blog Little Green Footballs might has prevented the B-sphere becoming as influential as it has if it had been available to newsmedia sites from around 2001 onwards...)
 
We know that what we find is more likely to be factual. LOL

I don't have a problem with wikipedia so I wouldn't know where else to go.

Sort of random, but I'm wondering if all the great websites were created in this milleimum.
 
Having made the requisite joke at their expense, I will admit that Wikipedia has been an invaluable resource in writing my "World Of Laughter, World Of Tears" TL.
 
Wikipedia is the best, if Wikipedia doesn't exists, Britannica would be the dominant.

You have to subscribe to Britannica, which might put a lot of people off. I did so for a while, in order to research stuff for university assignments.

Before Wikipedia, I recall using CD-ROM encyclopaedias (well, Encarta, but could have been others). Not as extensive as things like Wikipedia but what it did have, usually linked to other resources on the Web too so you could find out more without having to trundle through Google/(insert search engine here) search results.

Of course, minus the fact that some of the stuff is a bit tongue-in-cheek and is only ever composed of what people happen to be interested in, h2g2 was an early attempt at a Wikipedia-like "democratic" information resource. It might not have been so eclipsed without Wikipedia, and become more serious. In short, the idea was not originated in Wikipedia, and if it did not exist, there would be reason to create it...
 
Researching various stuff I find Google book search is pretty useful.

Maybe if that service had existed/been as extensive in 2002 as it now is then a spanner is thrown in the works for Wiki?
 
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