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johnisgood 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What about https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond?

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.

	▲	f1shy 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	Romario77 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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 Wikipedia is uneven, some popular topics are well covered and have good info, others are outdated, biased, often written by one person with agenda.
	▲	johnisgood 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I prefer the Britannica one, too.

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jbki 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I in fact sometimes do switch to simple english

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andrepd 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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!

	▲	jbki 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	f1shy 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.