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Google Goes to Answers.com
tod_miller writes "Google has changed its definitions link from dictionary.com to answers.com. A google search for juxtaposition shows the effect. What is interesting is that answers.com pulls information from wikipedia.org, which was provided bandwidth by google.com [and now Google is providing a service that will be used worldwide to pull information off Wikipedia]. Aside from having both a dictionary.com and a wikipedia.org search box in FireFox (as well as Google) the definition link on Google is still useful and I regularly check it for obscure uses or exact definitions of words. Now it uses answers.com we do not get all the different forms of the word, but we do get any medical or wikipedic information. Interestingly, answers.com does not use Google AdSense, but commission junction that looks like it. There is no announcement yet from Google of their change." This change took place several weeks ago, as players of e-scrabble and other compulsive word-checkers might have noticed. Update: 03/13 23:20 GMT by T : (Also mentioned in passing last month.) Update: 03/14 02:13 GMT by T : Brion Vibber writes: "Google does *not* provide any bandwidth to Wikipedia at this time, except in the sense that they 'use up' our bandwidth when people using
their search engine come to our site. ;)"
Frankly, Wikipedia is not ready for the big time. The definitions they have for many words are pretty inadequate. Greater scrutiny and the juxtaposition of a 'real' dictionary with the wiki version should highlight the glaring deficiencies. But really - what is wiki's presence in the definitions list going to provide? Certainly nothing authoritative or expert or even accurate?
Hopefully never.
Wikipedia is not peer-reviewed in the classical sense. It is not a replacement for peer-reviewed research. It is not a replacement for primary sources or anything else. It is a replacement for the encyclopedia. Do you trust encyclopaedia britanica as much as academic journals? I hope not.
If you're conducting serious research, you are definitly not going to be using an encyclopaedia beyond the first 5 minutes. Wikipedia won't change that. It's good if you just want a quick overview of a subject or a what books an author wrote or something, but it's not a replacement for actual research.
Or, perhaps, it is not so sumple. Perhaps it is more a problem of education. Had you known that proper wiki-based research should include not only viewing the articles on the topics you seek, but also a glance at the recent history of the page, and the Talk pages, to see how many "eyeballs" have seen the page, and if there are any recent questionable edits. Unlike a book encyclopedia, a Wiki is a two-way medium, and you can't ignore that fact and try to treat it like other one-way media.
Wasn't Google invented as a tool to search through books?
Why don't they just add 1 book called the dictionary to their own site to solve the problem?
>Had you known that proper wiki-based research should include not only viewing the articles on the topics you seek, but also a glance at the recent history of the page, and the Talk pages, to see how many "eyeballs" have seen the page, and if there are any recent questionable edits.
Pleeeeze! It's like telling people that proper Linux use includes viewing source code, fiddling kernel recompiles and checking recent diffs in the CVS tree.
If that's the way to use Wikipedia, then I'd rather do my own Google search on the term and check several trustworthy sources (usually a 3:2:1 mixture of commercial, academic and personal sites).
Soon a day will come when there will be a site that will automate this and show stuff on-the-fly (similar to Google News) instead of relying on the hopeless method of using actual people to copy and rewrite content as Wikipedia does.
In general, I use it (like any encyclopedia) as a good "starting source," i.e. a place to get basic background information to start real research.
So.... One of the real issues is that you have a strong issue in encyclopedias of scholarly fads. So no encyclopedia should be assumed to be an authority on anything. It is a jack-of-all-topics-master-of-none sort of issue.
Interestingly when my father in law fell ill, I was able to use wikipedia to get good information regarding his (rare) illness (an autoimmune disorder called ITP). It was not my only reference, but it was the clearest and most concise one I could find.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP