this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Wikis are not really a defense against this issue, they are by nature a secondary or (occasionally by policy) a tertiary source of information. Once the source they are recording dies so does the value of that page on the wiki. From the OP:

54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There's nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they're collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it's just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.

And I believe that they could help a lot with this issue if people migrated/copied meaningful info from forums (like Lemmy) to wikis. Forums are good for discussion, but they tend to accumulate a lot of trash; having the good content sieved and sorted in a wiki makes it more accessible for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

There’s nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they’re collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it’s just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.

This is an accurate point. Thanks for the correction. I think what I should have said is that the biggest one has that policy and, as a result, there is a trend of others following suit.