Having started using genAI, I can’t resist comparing its coverage with Wikipedia – and the result is rather surprising. Not that Wikipedia isn’t comprehensive, but genAI frequently gives me the sentence or definition I am looking for even quicker than Wikipedia.
I don’t want to knock Wikipedia; it is quite simply the most comprehensive encyclopedia available. As someone who was brought up having to consult articles in the relevant print volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia wins not only from convenience, but also from scale. Millions of entries, as opposed to some 65,000 in the last print edition of Britannica – it’s just no contest.
Yet here is an example where Wikipedia’s scale perhaps counts against it. I recently visited a country house, Newby Hall in Yorkshire, famous for William Weddell prolific acquisition of sculptures on the Grand Tour he made in 1764-65. A catalogue of the archives from Newby Hall talks about “the damning critiques of [the aristocracy’s] luxury (most famously John Brown’s Estimate of 1759”. Who was John Brown, and what was his “Estimate”?
Copilot said:
“John Brown’s Estimate” usually refers to An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, a highly influential political and moral essay by the English clergyman and writer John Brown (1715–1766). It was first published in 1757, though it remained widely discussed and reprinted in subsequent years, including 1758 and 1759.
Of course, with Wikipedia, you can’t (currently) ask natural-language questions. All you can do is search for relevant terms, and I looked for “John Brown Estimate” – only to get an error message, that “the page “John Brown Estimate” does not exist”. Wikipedia describes the Estimate, but under the heading John Brown (essayist) (there are several John Browns), and only five paragraphs into the article. The article begins:
John Brown (5 November 1715 – 23 September 1766) was an English Anglican priest, playwright and essayist.
All that is no doubt true (and I don’t need to look up “English”), but Brown is best known for his Estimate, as Google tells you in its AI Overview:
The 18th-century English essayist and clergyman John Brown is best known for his 1757 best-selling work, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times. The book was a stinging critique of British society and earned him the lifelong nickname “Estimate” Brown.
That Google AI summary gives me exactly what I want.
One article does not constitute a valid sample, I know, but it strikes me that Wikipedia’s role, which is to summarise secondary literature, is ably done by LLMs, particularly with their ability to present the most relevant content first. I’m not suggesting replacing Wikipedia any time soon, but it seems to me it will be a useful exercise to make some further comparisons in the course of my reading between Wikipedia and genAI coverage.
Of course, you could think that consulting reference works is a questionable activity. John Brown in his Estimate claimed the aristocracy is guilty of “vain, luxurious and selfish effeminacy”, and no doubt looking things up in encyclopedias would be one of their failings – no matter which source they used to get their knowledge. But that’s for another post.
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