Slashdot Mirror
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."
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'.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
It certainly seems like Yahoo! is turning back around, hot on Google's heals. With Yahoo 360, Flickr, and their developer tools, it seems like they are becoming relevant (again.)
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.
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.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
"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.
They ARE working together! See!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
http://www.eclipse-plugins.info/eclipse/plugin_de
<jwales> In the interest of full disclosure I should add that Google
gave me a pen that lights up.
<jwales> When I saw that, I was like "oooh, pen!" and then I was soooo
mesmerized that I signed over the rights to everything. ha ha.
(actual quote, on IRC. It's funny; laugh.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.