Wikenigma – an Encyclopedia of Unknowns

[dang]

Related:

Wikenigma – an encyclopedia of scientific questions with no known answers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181165 - Dec 2022 (11 comments)

Wikenigma is an encyclopedia for topics with unknown answers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210258 - July 2022 (72 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)

[doener]

I also posted it 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42783625

[mattkevan]

Hit the random button a few times and every article was bird-related.

Every time I see a bird up close I’m struck by how weird they are, but I didn’t realise they were quite so mysterious.

[financetechbro]

I must’ve hit the random button 10 times and haven’t seen any bird related mysteries

[omoikane]

I wonder why Travelling Salesman Problem is included but not other NP-hard problems.

https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/computer_science/the_ravell...

(The URL really says "ravelling" and not "travelling". Maybe this article was hastily added)

[ruined]

other np-hard problems are not included because you haven't added them to the wiki

[encomiast]

Maybe they meant to add the np-complete version, in which case, do you really need more than one?

[bigdict]

Does it have an entry for what we don't know we don't know?

[trevithick]

https://www.theuncertaintyproject.org/tools/rumsfeld-matrix

[khnorgaard]

Well dude. We just don't know.

[dr_dshiv]

I was thinking about this concept yesterday, in the context of AI automation in the sciences.

It is difficult for anyone in any scientific field to know where the big knowledge gaps are. Yet I can plausibly imagine a method whereby LLMs could identify research gaps, particularly when supported by scientists in the field.

In a near world where human scientists and AI collaborate much more closely on semiautomated scientific knowledge production, finding and filling knowledge gaps might be an approach for guiding work.

[pavel_lishin]

I was surprised to find out that we apparently don't have a definitive explanation for how hangovers work: https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/medicine/diseases/g-l/hango...

[shermantanktop]

1400 articles, spanning math to medicine to biology to archeology and more…this is a tiny sip of an ocean of unknowns.

[sandworm101]

Considering the infinity of knowable facts, and the finite number of facts which are known, any list of unknowns will always be a drop in the proverbial bucket.

[tomcam]

The “random article” link is irresistible

[IshKebab]

Apparently philosophers don't know what holes are:

> https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/philosophy/holes

[mr_toad]

That’s funny because the concept of a gap or void as a fundamental part of the universe has been around for thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)

[speerer]

Mathematicians, meanwhile, have multiple answers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ymF1bp-qrjU

[jl6]

I wonder if there is an ethical limit to some categories of knowledge. There are surely some sociological phenomena which are currently unexplained, but could potentially be explained by, say, incredibly invasive monitoring of peoples’ lives, but which we would probably rather remain unexplained than go down that route.

[ninjanomnom]

Get a large enough population and you'll be able to get volunteers for any conceivable experiment.

[crazygringo]

This is super fun!

But I'm not super clear why it's a site of its own, rather than a list on Wikipedia?

Surely it's a list as serious as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

Or is there something less objective about it?

[codetrotter]

The “curator’s rationale” page maybe sheds some light on that, indirectly.

That Wikenigma aims to be about “known unknowns” and igniting curiosity. While Wikipedia is about gathering knowledge (“known knowns”). Possibly.

https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia

Although Wikipedia also has articles covering known unknowns.

I guess a reason for having Wilenigma is that it’s a place you can go and explore many different known unknowns without getting sucked into articles about known knowns. Possibly.

For example, both Wikenigma and Wikipedia have features for jumping to a random article. If you are looking specifically for known unknowns, it would be much better to use the link for random article on Wikenigma than on Wikipedia.

I am reminded of an animation I one time saw about a guy that was collecting questions. I can’t find it now, but if anyone knows which one I’m thinking of, please link it. I think watching that short animation illustrates a similar kind of idea to what seems to be the idea behind Wikenigma.

[legrandmag]

Seems like the server is down. Or OP has reached their bandwidth, hence the website not accessible

[ggm]

We just don't know is what I think Feynman was getting at in his criticism of physics teaching and how it tries to leverage the nth layer and n-1th layer to explain actions in the n+1 layer.

[vivzkestrel]

so basically one of the articles talks about why there should be an equal amount of matter and antimatter in the universe but in reality we havent been able to find antimatter, is it possible that our entire observable universe is a small area with matter rich concentration and there exists a much much bigger structure of the order of 1 decillion light years where random areas have concentrations of matter and antimatter and we are unfortunately stuck in the area with matter?

[wongarsu]

That would violate the Cosmological principle - the idea that viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers. Also the Copernican principle - the idea that our observation point in the universe is pretty average and not overly special.

Of course both of these principles aren't strongly supported by evidence. They are still usually assumed because they keep cosmology sane and verifiable.

[jokellum]

This is something that confused me also. I feel like this is a reasonable argument.

My only criticism I guess would be that this is unfalsifiable, so for the time being it's more productive to see if there's any possibility to explain that within the observable universe.

[sim7c00]

bandwidth limit exceeded :<