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.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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The Economist pioneered that strategy of teaching 22 year olds to sound like experts to distracted executives and middle-managers. I think their standards are above Vox's and definitely Vox Future Perfect's (eg. I don't think The Economist would have let SBF's private foundation hire them to write a profile of SBF).
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
there's this: https://nymag.com/news/features/ezra-klein-2014-2/
While Klein is being circumspect about the operational details of Project X, he suggests that breaking-news squibs could be very short and attached to constantly updated background articles, a bit like Wikipedia entries written by professional journalists. Long features might be regularly freshened up.
especially amusing considering this, published only nine months after vox launched. not sure how much objective resource building the professional journalism would be buying you there, ezra
https://deadspin.com/46-times-vox-totally-fucked-up-a-story-1673835447/
ah but if you assume a perfectly spherical polity of uniform density in a vacuum at absolute zero,, klein will still be wrong
Ezra Klein so centrist, he could both-sides a Moebius strip
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