Google killed DMOZ; Will Googlepedia take down Wikipedia?
Tim Finin, 3:31pm 9 October 2005DMOZ in 2005 is a short note from Phil Craven pronouncing dead the once innovative and exciting idea of a community created web directory.
“It was a fine concept, and it looked promising for a while, but the idea of DMOZ becoming the definitive catalog of the Web is gone. Improvements in the search engines eclipsed its value, and the growth rate of the Web meant that it could never achieve its goal. It began with an excellent concept, and they gave it a good shot, but it didn’t work. The continuing growth rate of the Web ensures that it can never work. It continues as a good directory of a large number of web sites, but that is all. And not many people use directories when the search engines produce such good results, and so quickly.”
One supporting fact is that there are only about 3000 active editors and a backlog of over one million submitted links for them to review.
The note caused me to wonder about what’s in store for today’s popular community created, structured knowledge source — Wikipedia. Are it’s days numbered?
Will we will see the development of a machine generated and maintained collection of articles on different topics? Topics that themselves are identified and selected by the machines, as they are in Google News
The development of such a Googlepedia would certainly qualify as a grad challenge — one that might knowledge representation, semantic web technologies, natural language understanding, natural language generation as well as the ability to form a neutral and objective view in the face of conflicting information.
So maybe Wikipedia is safe for a generation.
Ebiquity Blog
October 9th, 2005 at 6:41 pm
DMOZ Dead? Wikipedia Next?
Here’s a rehash of the perpetual “DMOZ is Dead” noise that echoes across webmaster forums every so often.
One nitpick: There are about 9-10K active editors at any …
October 10th, 2005 at 8:28 am
As a heavy user of Wikipedia and “mod” developer of Wikipedia I think wikipedia will live on. My belief stems from three primary elements 1. the overall user momentum it has, 2. the ease of editing by anyone (versus submitting a site and waiting a year to see if included) and 3 the overall content license which allows any body or any site to use the content.
To that matter I’ve put together a RSS Feed for Wikipedia under the GNU. The feed works for every single Wikipedia topic so this means I have more than 730,000 high quality RSS feeds available. The feed is hosted and cached on the servers at BlinkBits which makes the Wikipedia Servers very happy.
* Here is the url format: http://www.blinkbits.com/rssfeeds/wikipedia.php?w=Topic_name
Finally, I don’t think google will replace it and face the backlash of Google is Big Brother.
Wikipedia: Blinklmc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Blinklmc
October 10th, 2005 at 10:43 am
When I made this post I thought I was making up the name , but that term has been used for the result of a proposal that Google made last year (link) to host Wikideida.
What I had in mind as Googlepedia was an encyclopedic source of knowledge that was constructed and maintained automatically.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Hi there,
The Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is a worthless sh** and should be banned altogether from the internet, because it is misguiding people, especially the young ones, that believe it to be a reliable source - when the actually fact is that most if it’s stuff is stolen from other reliable encyclopedias such as the Britannica…
My opinion is that ignorance kids and hackers, that were not allowed to write into other reliable and recognized sources such as the Britannica, - are now making the Wikipedia; but what a mess they are making!
Thank you.
Barry M. More