Dvorak on Google and Wikipedia

cryptoluddite writes "PC Magazine has an article by John C. Dvorak expanding on the community discussion of Google's offer for free web hosting of Wikipedia. Those against the deal point out that Google may be planning to co-opt the encyclopedia as Googlepedia (by restricting access to the complete database). In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.' Should public domain information be free?" It's a pretty scary scenario painted, but one can hardly take a speech from 2001 as serious evidence these days. Update: 02/16 20:16 GMT by T : This story links inadvertently to the second page of the column; here's a link to the first page.

Comments

Is this just alarmist talk from a doomsayer?

[StateOfTheUnion]

hose against the deal point out that Google may be planning to co-opt the encyclopedia as Googlepedia (by restricting access to the complete database).

Can they do that? The wikipedia is governed by the GNU Free Documentation License . . .wikipedia details here.

This is why Jimbo didn't want the details to leak

[Neophytus]

Speculation runs rife. I guess security through well... not very obscurity's bound to get someone chatting in the end.

The deal in the short to medium term with wikipedia is expected to be the provision of about a dozen caching servers. No actual database work would be done by google. There is already a small (3) squid cluster in Paris that does this for users in the UK and France saving on some transatlantic bandwidth.

Google Groups is still Usenet...

[GillBates0]

As I understand it, Google Groups is just one more interface to Usenet, like zillion others offered by ISPs, schools, and other servers. The propogation mechanism of messages is still the same, and they just offered a way for people to access News using a web based interface (lots of other sites offer this) rather than through a regular News reader (rtin, etc).

I'm fine with Google offering a faster mirror/interface to Wikipedia, because mirroring of information is always good. From the last /. article on the subject, I gathered that Google would offer their faster processing power and ub3r bandwidth to Wikipedia....but that doesn't necessarily mean they get to hijack the content....they'd just provide a faster way to get to information that's mirrored elsewhere.

Dirty tricks 101: quotes out of context

[saddino]

In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.

The only thing "revealing" about that article is that Page continues "Somebody else needs to figure out how to reward all the people who create the things that you use. " In other words, what Page would like to see is a system where "users" pay for accessing content and "contributors" are paid for providing it.

This /. story could have equally read "Does Google Want to Pay Wiki authors?" but of course, that would have derailed cryptoluddite's agenda to smear Google.

To the editors: when you see the words may be planning, just ignore the submission in the future. TIA.

Wrong.

[Raul654]

You're wrong. The problem wasn't that we didn't have enough servers, but that the servers we had were misconfigured. The slowness experienced in January was resolved when the configuration bugs were ironed out. The problem is a lack of skilled sysadmins and developers. (And for the record, we just put in an order for 10 more servers)