Yahoo! Search Providing Support to Wikipedia

Jamesday writes "Yahoo! Search will also be providing support for Wikipedia. Discussions, started at the same time as the aforementioned Google announcement, have been ongoing with both Yahoo! and Google but only the Google news leaked. It's now more clear why Wikipedia said there was no need to worry about undue influence from any single sponsor."

Comments

How about from two?

[tquinlan]

While Yahoo! and Google may be competitors, the two of them often do collaborate, with Yahoo! even using Google to do their searches. I don't know if I'm entirely comfortable with a caveat about "not worrying about undue influence from any one vendor" when the other 'opposing' influence is in the game for the same reason and has a history of working with is 'competitor'.

good news

[kebes]

Wikipedia is great, IMHO. The main thing holding back really is hardware. It often runs too slowly and in particular using wikipedia's built-in search often returns a "server is overloaded" response. (I guess that's why I always use Google to search for the correct wikipedia page.)

That's why I think these deals are a good thing. If companies are willing to donate bandwidth and server storage to wikipedia, that will help the project quite a bit. Of course, we are all concerned about wikipedia being corrupted by companies, and something awful happening to the whole project. I, for one, think wikimedia is smart enough and dedicated enough to avoid this. And even if they arn't, let's all remember that the whole *point* of wikimedia releasing everything under commons licensing is that *no one* (not even wikimedia) can lock the content away or commercialize it. If wikimedia starts becoming evil, someone can (and will) fork the project and re-release the entire thing.

No Worries...

[Shadow Wrought]

The way that Wikipedia is set up, with the constant editing of its pages, I'm not concerned about in the least about what influence Google or Yahoo! might have. Wikipedia started without them, and there is no reason why, if the worse case scenarios happen, that another collaborative encyclopedia cannot be started. It simply too good of an idea to succumb that easily.

Bad trend

[Anonymous Coward]

"The shortcuts will show contextually relevant abstracts of Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/ articles in response to user queries."

Meaning that people will search for something, be present with an encyclopedia (which isn't) by the search engine, then take what it says to be correct as if it had been fact-checked. There are just too many errors in Wikipedia for it be turning up when students search for things on the internet.

Re:Bad trend

[mrbooze]

In what way is Wikipedia "Peer-reviewed"? *Anyone* can update an entry, right? Like, I could decide to submit my own interpretations on string theory, despite my knowing nothing about string theory and having no credentials on that subject at all.

That's not at all like a real peer-reviewed journal, where the review and comment process is much more rigorous.

Sure, if I spew some blatantly false blather, someone will eventually catch it and fix it. But how long will the wrong information be out there for some poor student to see and think is true vetted "peer-reviewed" data?

My wife teaches various aspects of anthropology and works with some genuine peer-reviewed academic journals. She'd never accept Wikipedia as a real reference in a student paper. (She in fact rants about it frequently for how common errors are.) Neither would she accept someguyswebsite.com either, of course. Many credible sources also have their own websites, and then there's always the horrible prospect of actually going into a library for research.

Wikipedia has its uses, I still refer to it myself sometimes when I'm just looking something up out of curiosity, but I treat everything I read there with a grain of salt.

This article by one of Wikipedia's original co-founders I think very precisely sums up some of the challenges Wikipedia faces to be considered a true, academic-level information source on par with "real" peer-reviews journals and encyclopedias.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25

Critics of web referencing to lose ground

[Douglas Simmons]

Teachers in particular have frequently demanded that students not use the web as sources because "anyone could write anything" and not be held accountable. However, with Wiki, while people can indeed write anything, everything is subjected to heavy scrutiny by the God-knows-how-many visitors to the site. Errors get corrected, definitions expand and over time the site gets more traffic and its content accelerates exponentially to perfection, or at least to the accuracy of a two-shelf encyclopedia (except up to date).

With Yahoo joining the club, the site obviously will get a tremendous boost in the aforementioned correlation of increased visitors producing increased accuracy. Also, with the Yahoo deal, and with other dynamic visitor-updated info sites like blogs being taken more seriously by the mainstream media, you can expect other high rolling companies to follow Yahoo's lead.

By the way, when I'm looking for an answer to any question that requires human interpretation to my query, I use ask-it-here. While I'm being informative, here's a link to a Firefox extension that lets you (I think by means of a right click) look up a word quickly on a number of sites including Wiki.