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Ultimately, Wikipedia provides an effective keyword lookup that maps to curated links. Regardless, the notion of a general web index is well nigh moot at this
by OneWordSoln 7y ago
Ultimately, Wikipedia provides an effective keyword lookup that maps to curated links.
Regardless, the notion of a general web index is well nigh moot at this point due to its not having been built into the system from the get-go. Any such attempt at this point will be, by definition, ad hoc and built by some group of individuals, with the vastness of the content, the cost of the project and the intrinsic conflicts that will no doubt arise making independence from finance and legal issues non-trivial, to say the least.
Really, Wikipedia is the most sensible foundation I can imagine, given that Google has become a self-serving for-profit corporate advertising machine.
- marktangotango 7y agoGood observation. This makes me think of all the useful content Wikipedia doesn’t link to though.
- OneWordSoln 7y agoThanks. And yeah, WP is really only a broad, top-tier foundation that can (and has) grow(n) organically in a rather appropriately demand-driven way. [Of course, such human systems will always have problems on touchy subjects as digital information is always most useful for factual subjects where opinions are less relevant.] Really, I am of the perspective that a machine-grokked indexing system will always be less useful in a significant set of edge-cases than a human-curated index due to such factors as language ambiguity and gaming of such algorithms. As well, the sheer size of the internet requires ranking the pages to ensure the most useful links are properly denoted as such. WP, being likely the most important and useful crowd-sourced and -built human information system, it is up to us to both keep it funded and add the information we deem important.