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Recent Wikipedia articles are kind of an oxymoron; Wikipedia by design is meant to be a tertiary source, downstream of both news media but also mainstream scholarship. The problem is that it's "an encyclopaedia anyone can edit" — and that inherently means a rush to create or update articles when news outlets publish something novel.

While news media is an acceptable source, proper peer-reviewed journals and other scientific publications are preferred. People would do well to remember Wikipedia is NOTNEWS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...).


I find the source collating of Wikipedia helpful for recent events. That's when you're going to get most editor interest to improve the page and readers to consume it.

Yeah basing articles on scholarly books is good, but not every topic will be covered and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AThe_deadline_is_no...


Not every topic will be covered yet. While *The deadline is now* is an essay, *WP:NOTNEWS* is policy — and inherent in an encyclopedia.

Yeah WP:NOTNEWS is policy, and it starts with

> In principle, all Wikipedia articles should contain up-to-date information. Editors are also encouraged to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events.

There clearly is editor and reader interest in making decent quality articles on major current events. Yes they may contain errors that the history book on topic won't contain, but I still think it's worth having. Just mind the things to avoid listed in WP:NOTNEWS and I think we will be fine

And I don't think everything will ever be covered in a book. There is not an infinite amount of scholars studying every random significant event. And those will probably use the same news articles as one of their sources anyway.


Unfortunately to survive the next few hundred years, we may need another dictator of human behaviour than what the market wants.

Rewritten *into* Flutter? People should be rewriting away from Flutter.


https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche... and the previous blog post linked from there gives some context as to why we rewrote the Zulip mobile apps from React Native to Flutter.

Our Flutter experience over the last few months since launch has been very positive. Most importantly, development velocity is much faster than it was on React Native.


To what? What is the alternative?


Expo/RN TBH.


Looks to be some sort of subscription licensed framework, and lacks desktop support. Why should I move off an open source platform onto a hosted solution? Especially in the context of OP’s situation.


It's just react native tooling


Native is also a good option, for something used that extensively.


I believe Flutter was chosen because of somewhat easy way of keeping common codebase for both iOS and Android clients. Not trivial, and at least it renders natively :V


Flutter compiles to native though? I’m not sure I understand what you are saying.


Flutter "compiles to native," but the UI is just a giant canvas they paint themselves. React Native uses real native views, so you get actual platform widgets, accessibility, and OS-level optimizations instead of shipping your own game engine.

Also, Google has a habit of hyping projects then quietly killing them (I sadly took the Polymer ride).


Makepad looks really promising


Why?


That's a useful strawman for this issue, but you know as well as I do that none of those bogeymans were anywhere near as transformative as the smartphone. They were not networked, they were static, and they had limits (eg. TVs limited programming). They are incomparable to a never-ending firehose of stimulus, algorithmically engineered to be appealing to your personality and optimised for "engagement" (read: more screen time).


Does this argument then reinforce the value of government news orgs like we see in Australia (ABC) & England (BBC) - if England's was to exist without the draconian tv licence? Edited: I didnt mean impartial but rather non-commercial, updated.


UK political coverage is really bad precisely because of "bothsidesism". I feel the TV license has outlived its era.


Britain, not England!

I do not think it is all that good. I think the biggest problem is the nature of news media. It tends to shallow coverage, and video more than audio, and audio more than print.

I agree with the GP that people in a democracy should strive to have a informed opinion, but I think the best way to achieve that is to read books on the issues, not follow the news.

People cannot evaluate the accuracy of what they read either - that is why "Gell-Mann amnesia" is a problem. Again, it is a less prevalent problem with books and more detailed analysis (but it still exists, of course) than with news media.

The sheer complexity of a modern society makes it very hard to be well informed. Most people in the UK do not even understand the taxes they pay. I can guarantee that almost all otherwise well informed and educated people in the UK cannot explain national insurance correctly (the second biggest source of revenue, generating about two third of what income tax does), or how VAT works and what it is imposed on (just behind NI).

Understanding of economics is even worse. Anything niche like competition in software and online services (the sort of thing we often discuss on HN) is non existent. Even issues like education and healthcare that are not niche but are complex are not well understood.

At the end of the day most people vote tribally (i.e. the party they identify with) or emotionally.


Actually - the UK not Britain - the latter leaving out NI?


I just looked at my comment and realised, then I saw your comment!


But it all comes down to the execution of it. Sweden has a Public Service thats financed by a tax-like-system.

Swedish public service is imho very bad. Its shallow, narrow, angled and generally never (or rarely) leaves you feeling informed. Their debates are laughable, their interviews are short, uninformed (the interviewer is) and is generally closer to gotcha-journalism than whatever a random Youtube-interview is where they get to complete their sentences.

The Swedish PS has an enourmous budget and has very little to show for it. It should be reformed.


> The Swedish PS has an enourmous budget and has very little to show for it. It should be reformed.

Same goes for Germany. It's also a system heavily under critique. There are something like 20 public tv stations and 50 public broadcasts but they all cater to a rather narrow audience of age 50+ people with lots of folk music, old shows and whatnot. Young people are not represented. It's a shame, there could be so much good stuff out there.


> to a rather narrow audience of age 50+

Not so narrow if you take into account that median age in Germany is 45.3y old, average age is 49.8y old and you take a look at its population pyramid. Add to that +65 people are probably the biggest consumers of medias because they have more free time.


can you elaborate?


Gmail will clip emails if they’re larger than (I think) 104kb.

Using frameworks like mjml can add a lot of arbitrary markup that’ll rapidly increase the size of your email.


the mjml components unpack to a very large number of html tags. so depending on how you structure the doc it can exceed the gmail doc size with a surprisingly small amount of content


Wow. This sort of obstructionism is what convinces people Open Source is not worth the time and effort. Really disappointing. As someone else said in that issue, "perfect is the enemy of good". Thousands of KMs of road are currently not VISIBLE on the map due to stonewalling.


The material difference between this and someone intentionally sabotaging things is in practice, zero.

It's crazy destructive


As someone who has been in a fair few discord chats with soldiers, I'd beg to differ...


>As someone who has been in a fair few discord chats with soldiers, I'd beg to differ...

As someone that's spent a lot of time in darker places, I would agree.


For $150 I want a native app


If you sincerely believe this, you've tinkered enough that the massive knowledge barrier that is Linux seems like nothing to you.

I would never sit my 70 year old mother down in front of a Linux machine. We're not at "caring that video files download too slowly" - we're at "how do I put a file on a USB".


Put USB stick into computer, click on "Files" in the program chooser, select the USB drive (helpfully listed as "USB drive" even), drag your files there?

Same as on Windows and MacOS really. I don't dispute that Linux has rough edges, but putting files on a USB stick is not one of them tbh.


It really works very well for my father-in-law and he's over 75 now. Debian gives me a peace of mind I would never have with him using Windows.


I have very little Linux sys admin knowledge and have been using it on my home notebook for 5years and my work one two years now.

Really no issues with the OS.

I was using the very excellent 2015 Mac book pro before, but despite hardware that isn’t quite as nice (not bad though) that hardware I can’t go back to Mac OS. I know I pay a premium to get it pre installed over windows, but it’s not bad.


I do sit my 75-y.o. mother in front of a Linux machine, and it's fine.


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