[morzh]

Actually, English language Wikipedia is reasonably accurate.
And, mind you, no oen 100% accurate, even atomic clock and тхе International Bureau of Weights and Measures (OK, well, how accurate can be anything that is near Paris, France, right)?

Actually, while back in the USSR, we had an expression, kinda analogous to "cut the air with a knife" when it refers to pollution (yes it could refer to anything intangibe that is thick, atmosphere, mood and, yes, pollution). The expression is "you could hang up an axe".
So we invented a physical unit for pollution call "1 Perd" (1 Fart), and the definiton was that the air should be as thick as to allow to hang up a platinum-iridium ax weighing 1kg at the height of 1m from the Earth' surface.
For practical measurements the suggested units would be 1mF (milli-Fart) as to achieve 1F to that moment was not possible.

[DaleHCook]

Actually, English language Wikipedia is reasonably accurate.

That accuracy can vary greatly depending upon subject in areas in which I have expertise. I have found Wikipedia to be generally accurate in music, as I have had a career working in radio which began in 1969.

I find Wikipedia to be significantly less accurate in genealogy, where I began my research about 1988. I soon learned how to conduct that research in accordance with professional and scholarly standards. I have since been published in one of the scholarly genealogical journals. For years I have written a column for a popular journal which practices scholarly standards. In recent years I have become part of the governance of the largest all-volunteer genealogical project in the country. Too high a percentage of the genealogical articles on Wikipedia are written by people who are not working in accordance with professional and scholarly standards. The errors in those articles reveal the lack of proper research on the part of the writer.

[morzh]

Wikipedia, the English version of it, is that good middle of readily available info and its accuracy, considering it could be, at least temporarily, edited by God knows whom.

This is because you haven't read Russian Wikipedia which, in addition to some very inaccurate statements (in the past, perhaps they are better now) also uses not very academic language with plenty of emotional adjectives, which always ticks me off.

Wikipedia has decent article in medicine, pharmacology, chemistry etc. It is not too bad in history either.

Again, if one wants a scientific article, he should go to the scientific source library and use that one. Wikipedia, to me, never pretended to be as authoritative as Britannica was. And then, any Encyclopaedia, or, for that matter, scientific source, is only good up to up-to-date scientific knowledge; what was true yesterday, could be insufficiently accurate, inaccurate, or plain wrong today. And then could become true again tomorrow.

With to a degree exception of the math, science is fickle as a woman in Rigoletto's aria. Qual piuma al vento.

[RodB]

A 1940 Webster Dictionary defined Aurora Boreaiis as "reflections of sunlight off icebergs". That couldn't have come from a librarian at MIT.

[Arran]

I keep running into A.I on Brave browser search results, it just appeared one day, and there is not an obvious way to turn it off. If I am looking for something like Nostalgia Air I do not need a commentary about Nostalgia Air, or how good it is, or whether the webmasters are Republican donors, or supporters of the CPUSA, I want that site.
Regards
Arran

[DaleHCook]

Arran -

Have you tried using a different search engine? I use Duck Duck Go, which usually finds what I want with less garbage than Google. I only use Google when Duck Duck Go fails me.

[morzh]

I use Google BECAUSE Duck Duck Go fails me.

So far Google is the best search engine in my experience. And Ai could be annoying, but also could be helpful. I'd prefer it to kick in when I ask for it. But I can ignore it if I don't need its assistance.

[Arran]

Dale;
Other then the recent A.I nonsense Brave has been pretty good, I also have Duck Duck Go in case Brave comes up short, and whatever the Microsoft one is currently called. I like using Brave because I don't get as many problems with ads and spyware, I can also watch Y.T, and other video sharing sites, without having to deal with commercials. Duck Duck Go is pretty much using Poohgle's search engine but without the Poohgle cookies ending up in your machine, but it's not as good at blocking spyware as Brave is. I view A.I as just "the latest thing" like with the Dot Con boom in the late 1990s all of the hype is going going to come crashing down, it will do some things well, and that will carry on, but identifying things from photos, or writing compositions, or producing videos they seem to be rubbish at.
Regards
Arran