Interesting thread and questions. A related question though is whether unfettered eternal searchability of the Internet is unambiguously a good thing. Take the types of BLP, privacy, etc. issues we deal with everyday on Wikipedia, and extrapolate them to the rest of the 'net....
Newyorkbrad On 1/14/11, Carcharoth <carcharot...@googlemail.com> wrote: > (Following on from another thread) > > I have a theory that Wikipedia makes only *part* of the Internet not > suck. Wikipedians aggregate online knowledge (and offline as well, but > let's stick to online here), thus making it easier to find information > about something, especially when there are lots of ambiguous hits on a > Google search and you don't know enough to refine the search. But the > useful parts of the internet (i.e. not the social media and similarly > non-transient information-deficient areas of the internet) didn't stop > growing when Wikipedia came along. > > In theory, if the growth of the information-dense parts of the > internet has continued to outstrip the growth of Wikipedia and the > ability of Wikipedians to aggregate that knowledge base, then large > parts of that part of the internet should still "suck" (to continue > using that terminology) - i.e. be less amenable to searching due to > absence of information or poorly organised information. I base this on > many years of searching daily for information about topics ranging > from the well-known to the borderline obscure to the outright obscure. > > Over the years since Wikipedia started, the ability to find > information online has changed beyond recognition. Around about 2004-5 > (I need to check dates here), Wikipedia was rising rapidly up the > search rankings, and now comes top or near the top on most searches. > But there are still many, many topics on which no articles, or only > redlinks, exist. I come across these daily when searching, and see > that information on these topics is out there, scattered around if you > search on Google, but hasn't been aggregated yet. > > The question I have is whether the growth in the amount of > unaggregated information (and I include other information-organising > sites here, not just Wikipedia) will always outstrip the ability of > various processes (include the growth of Wikipedia) to aggregate it > into something more useful? If the long-term answer is yes, then > information overload is inevitable (and search engines will gradually > start to suck again). If the long-term answer is no, then at some > point the online aggregation (or co-ordination of data to form > information in the real sense) will start to overtake the flow of > information from offline to online, and order will continue to emerge > from the (relative) chaos. > > The key seems to be the quality of the information put online. > Well-organised and searchable sites and databases are good. Poorly > organised information sources, less so, as while they can in theory be > found by search engines, they may be less easy to distinguish from the > background noise, though it also depends greatly on the amount of > information you start with when carrying out a search for more > information. > > To take a specific example, I very occasionally come across names of > people or topics where it is next-to-impossible to find out anything > meaningful about them because the name is identical to that of someone > else. Sometimes this is companies that name themselves after something > well-known and any search is swamped by hits to that well-known > namesake. Other times, it is someone more famous swamping a relatively > obscure person - a recent example I found here is the physicist Otto > Klemperer. Despite having the name and profession, it is remarkably > difficult to find information about the physicist as opposed to the > composer. If I had a birth year, it would be much easier, of course. > > Carcharoth > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l