What do we think about posting Wikipedia articles to Tildes?

I generally don't like it, and have previously discouraged it (and even removed them in some cases). Here's a comment I posted on one that I removed last year:

Please don't just submit a random Wikipedia article with no context. If you'd like to start a discussion about something in the article, consider making a text post explaining what you find interesting about it, so that people have something to go off.

I know that this is something that people do regularly on Hacker News, but I don't think it's a good behavior to emulate. It's the equivalent of old forum posts like: "Giraffes. Discuss." It's not an effective way to get a conversation started.

As a comment to a topic, I think it's fine. I don't know about as topics themselves though. I think it would end up being a r/TIL thing where none of the information is really all that interesting. Slash it becomes a race for easy points.

I'd say Wikipedia entries are fine as links to supporting information in a comment, especially when clarifying terms of a discussion or providing a quick summary of what's already established knowledge.

The examples you provided are highly controversial (in a way that's known to provoke endless partisan bickering), or insufficiently broad to facilitate the discussion indicated by "how should we make money".

I recall a couple of very obscure Wiki entries posted as curiosity topics for discussion, but don't think that they spurred much useful commentary. I'd say Wikipedia entries are potential sources of low-effort topic posts which should be discouraged, unless the questions they provoke are clearly and explicitly stated as ask.survey or otherwise opened to more involved conversations.

Hmm, so random (in more ways than one) idea this got me thinking about...

Wikipedia has a random article link on their sidebar. This takes you to a completely random article, which means it's typically short / not super interesting.

Wikipedia also has featured articles:

Featured articles are considered to be some of the best articles Wikipedia has to offer, as determined by Wikipedia's editors. They are used by editors as examples for writing other articles. Before being listed here, articles are reviewed as featured article candidates for accuracy, neutrality, completeness, and style, according to our featured article criteria. There are 5,713 featured articles out of 6,011,932 articles on the English Wikipedia (~0.1% are featured).

You can get a random featured article using this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RandomInCategory/Featured_articles

I think it might be interesting to have a Tildes-y take on "today I learned", where a bot or the site itself posted a new random featured article once a day. Comments in the thread could focus on interesting wiki-rabbit-holes that the featured article sent us down, or any other interesting "TIL" type content.

Because of the vetting done by Wikipedia's process, this is one of the rare cases where I think it would make sense to allow a bot to post content, on the assumption that it'll be high-quality and in-depth enough to be on Tildes.

edit: here's a kick-the-tires topic I posted to get a concrete demo of how this might work

I gave up arguing this point ages ago. I'm against it, but other people like it.

I came up with my own solution: I've created a filter for all posts tagged wikipedia, and I tag all these posts with wikipedia. Out of sight, out of mind!

EDIT: This explains why I didn't see this post until I stumbled across an untagged Wikipedia post elsewhere by @spit-evil-olive-tips. This post is tagged with wikipedia so it's hidden from me. Oh well. The benefits still outweigh the drawbacks.