Are CRUD webapps today the modern version of the "expert system"? From Wikipedia, citations omitted:

In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, represented mainly as if–then rules rather than through conventional procedural code. The first expert systems were created in the 1970s and then proliferated in the 1980s. Expert systems were among the first truly successful forms of artificial intelligence (AI) software.
An expert system is divided into two subsystems: the inference engine and the knowledge base. The knowledge base represents facts and rules. The inference engine applies the rules to the known facts to deduce new facts. Inference engines can also include explanation and debugging abilities.

CRUD webapps (websites that allows users to Create new entries in a database, Read existing entries in a database, Update entries within the database, and Delete entries from a database) are very common on the Internet. It is a vast field, encompassing both small-scale blogs to large websites such as StackExchange. The biggest commonality with all these CRUD apps is that they have a knowledge base that users can easily add and edit.
CRUD webapps, however, use the knowledge base in many, myriad and complex ways. As I am typing this question on StackOverflow, I see two lists of questions - Questions that may already have your answer and Similar Questions. These questions are obviously inspired by the content that I am typing in (title and question), and are pulling from previous questions that were posted on StackExchange. On the site itself, I can filter by questions based on tags, while finding new questions using StackExchange's own full-text search engine. StackExchange is a large company, but even small blogs also provide content recommendations, filtration, and full-text searching. You can imagine even more examples of hard-coded logic within a CRUD webapp that can be used to automate the extraction of valuable information from a knowledge base.
If we have a knowledge base that users can change, and we have an inference engine that is able to use the knowledge base to generate interesting results...is that enough to classify a system as being an &quot;expert system&quot;? Or is there a fundamental difference between the expert systems and the CRUD webapps?
(This question could be very useful since if CRUD webapps are acting like &quot;expert systems&quot;, then studying the best practices within &quot;expert systems&quot; can help improve user experience.)
The key feature of an expert system is that the knowledge base is structured to be traversed by the inference engine.  Web sites like Stack Exchange don't really use an inference engine; they do full-text searches on minimally-structured data.  A real inference engine would be able to answer novel queries by putting together answers to existing questions; Stack Exchange sites can't even tell if a question is duplicate without human confirmation.