Can you say in all honesty that a read of the Wikipedia article for DNA would have been less helpful? It's less convenient perhaps, but definitely more authoritative.
Wikipedia is a great _reference_ but not necessarily the best way to learn about a topic. Of course, this depends on the topic, on who has been writing the page, etc
A particularly bad example is higher maths - a wiki pages on a complex mathematics topic often reads like "A gruncheon is a worch in the brashation of plusters" and each of these words is a separate page or topic. Of course, you _can_ in theory 'just' click through all the tree of linked pages to understand a concept ...
For DNA the page (scanning it now) is well laid out, with images (including a spinning Rasmol? image) and lots of detail. However, the detail could be a drag on understanding for some : There are 'nucleotides' and 'nucleosides' and 'nucleobases'? There are non-canonical bases? Supercoiling? Z-DNA? While I know (most) of these things, it is because I've learned about them in other contexts, or by direct instruction.
I'm not saying it is impossible to understand DNA from that page, but it is likely to be harder (for some?) than a more conversational approach to learning.
Fair point - but I wonder how many people that have visited Wikipedia know about simple wiki. I was probably aware of it, but not enough to remember to suggest it as an alternative!
I mean - it is certainly better ... but it is still a lot of stuff. For example:
> Part of an organism's DNA is "non-coding DNA" sequences. They do not code for protein sequences. Some noncoding DNA is transcribed into non-coding RNA molecules, such as transfer RNA, ribosomal RNA, and regulatory RNAs.
Do you _need_ to know about tRNA, rRNA, and operons (?) to understand DNA? The thing about an encyclopedia/wiki entry is that it has to cover the whole topic. This is a strength for reference, as you can scan it and find the bit you need. For learning from scratch, I can see that a conversational approach (with a human or LLM) has advantages where the learner can direct the level of detail and path through the material.
Ultimately, both are worthwhile, but I can also see the strengths/weaknesses of both ways to learn.
Wikipedia is completely non-interactive so of course the experience is different. Do you want to look up something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis and try and understand that from Wikipedia? If you don't understand it, you have to try and click elsewhere. With an LLM, I can be very specific, "I understand x, y, z about PCA but I don't understand why we have to do it? What happens if I don't apply it?" and the LLM most of the time will give very approachable explanations that can be refined further if I still don't get it.
I am studying for a Masters degree in Computer Science with AI and the lecture notes are like Wikipedia sometimes. Incomplete, perhaps assume pre-knowledge that lots of Masters students won't have. All of these I have taken to ChatGPT and got great explanations, diagrams, graphs etc.
