[Web4lib] Wikipedia WAS: Failed or transitory technologies

[K.G. Schneider]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:36:52 +0000, "Mike Taylor" <mike at indexdata.com>
said:
> K.G. Schneider writes:
>  > Hmmm... Wikipedia has a huge content base. I wonder if Google will
>  > fork it to get things going.
> 
> It hardly can, since Google's Wikipedia-alike seems to have as its
> selling point that the authorship of all its articles is known,
> acknowledged and (implicitly) appealed to as an authority.

As a one-time going-forward, they could certainly start there. Owners
could adopt pages they wanted to control. 

Or are they going to try to buy out or deal the death blow to
about.com...

> Anyway, I don't see how they can possibly expect this to fly.  The
> whole point of Wikipedia is that there is exactly one of it, and it's
> already hugely surpassed any conventional encyclopedia in terms of
> utility (note that I did NOT say reliability, but that is far from the
> only issue that contributes to utility).

I am not betting on its success, either. I'm just guessing possible
moves. My meta-observation is I'm wondering if Google's plan is to see
how far it can take over every business on the Web and whether spreading
itself so thin is going to work against it. Or perhaps they don't CARE
if it's another Wikipedia or even a success, and there's some monetizing
aspect to this they have up their sleeve. 

K.G. Schneider