I’ve seen a lot of people suggest with Google Base they’re competing with Craig’s List and eBay, but I see it much more as a play against Wikipedia. When I chatted with Jimmy Wales he said one of their biggest problems was for things that are relatively structured like the wiki dictionary or quotes having hte data in a totally unstructured wiki format makes it hard to work with. He suggested they would go the direction of mediawiki templates and microformats, which is great to hear. Google has come at it from the other direction, giving you a free-form DB to pour your heart into. I guess the question is, will people become as passionate about distribution (what Google promises) rather than working for the greater good of humanity through the Wikipedia.
So maybe a new tool needs to be created that will allow the community efforts like Wikipedia to succeed while ensuring that GoogleBot can consume all of that information for distribution.
Anybody for WPW – “WordPress Wiki”?
So you’re asking us to choose between a well structured DB and a mess-ly dumped one? Of course I’ll choose the first one. It’s now clear (well… it’s clear from the start actually) that Google wants to dominate the world wide web. Anything that they can’t own (or buy), they’ll create a counterpart for it. Pretty much like Yin and Yang…
How do they compare with Wikipedia when content published is only available for (max) 31 days?
My daughter is a documentary filmmaker for middle school ages with Learning Media of America. She is making a documentary on the late Rosa Parks. When she checked Wikipedia she found that someone had hacked the site and put on scurrilous racial remarks. She is computer-savvy enough to be able to remove them. It made her angry and her film will be much better for it.
How can Wikipedia — or Google — provide controls for this kind of behavior? The racist remarks were not immediately apparent, you had to actually read the material to “get it.”