I wrote a thing a decade or more ago I can’t find now, about the early history of Vox’s “explainers”. They were literally wanting to replace Wikipedia as a go-to.
i read a bit about that. i couldn’t find quotes from the site employees saying they were trying to be wikipedia, so i didn’t mention it because id have had to digress. but almost everyone who talked about the launch mentioned their weirdass card system for linking other articles, and that it was wikipedia like. and all the descriptions sounded AWFUL, like it would just be throwing useless rotating shit at you all the time
yeah, it was so inept and un wikilike that you would hardly believe it, but they honestly thought it would compete.
At one point Yudkowsy raised money for Arbital, “an attempted successor to Wikipedia and/or Tumblr and/or peer review” Cw attempts to suck up to J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, John Paulson
well, seems like that didn’t pan out, but I still have hope for my attempted successor to the automobile and/or trigonometry and/or Leonard Nimoy
