9 ms·

"I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikiped

"I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum." That won't matter much. Google loves the wikipedia.org domain so much, that any new site will need seriously hard work to get it even moving. In short, it won't have the traffic necessary to compete.

jacquesm 17y ago
You're placing the horse behind the cart. Google indexes websites, websites do not exist to be indexed by google. If another website will take wikipedias place in terms of quality and wikipedia will degrade then wikipedia will find that people will start linking to that other site. In time this will lead google to increase the ranking for these pages. Remember that google indexes PAGES not DOMAINS. So for every page that the new wikipedia contains that the old one does not the forked one gets right of way. It's not like wikipedia started off with millions of pages and lots of backlinks. The new project would be a fork in the open source sense, a new name with a fresh start and a chance to show how it can be done better. Its ability to lure people away from the 'old' wikipedia is what makes it go, the editors will determine its success, not google. And the chances of that success are simply a factor of how much time they put in collectively to make it different and better than the original.
- barrkel 17y ago
  There is, however, a network effect. I know I often link to Wikipedia because it's the first relevant link found in a search that contains a concise description of a concept that I don't want to define inline in my blog post / comment / etc. This would perpetuate Wikipedia even if it were completely unmanned and read-only.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Absolutely, they have a head-start. But given the fact that the future is literally infinite and wikipedia has only been around for a relatively short portion of that I think it is inevitable that at some point they'll be replaced by something better. If half the editors decide tomorrow to reboot then I don't doubt that given enough time they'll out-perform the infighters and the politicians. They'll have to be on guard against repeating the same mistakes from day 1 though to make it work.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      Alas, I think the editors are the infighters and politicians.
- natrius 17y ago
  > Remember that google indexes PAGES not DOMAINS. Pages on .edu domains used to get a huge boost, and it's possible that they still do.
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    I've never heard that. Can you substantiate that?
    - natrius 17y ago
      I don't think random SEO sites count as substantiation, but: http://www.lowprofilelinks.com/blog/?p=35 http://www.lowprofilelinks.com/blog/?p=35 http://www.articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/backlink-edu-power-with-links-and-guest-posts-1321865.html http://www.articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/backlin... Those only talk about inbound links from edu pages increasing one's PageRank, so maybe I was remembering incorrectly.
- tptacek 17y ago
  I'm not sure about your SEO policework here, Jacques. I'm pretty sure pages on Wikipedia do benefit from the cumulative pagerank of WP as a whole.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Unless google has tweaked their algorithm to give domains with a lot of high page ranked pages and automatic boost (and this may be the case but it has never ever been conclusively demonstrated) google is still indexing pages. There is a 'ban hammer' that has been applied to domains wholesale in the past, to give all the pages in a domain a PR of 0, but a PR boost across a domain has not been seen 'in the wild' as far as I know. A good test would be to find out-of-order wikipedia pages that have content that is clearly of lesser value than pages that are ranked lower. That would be fairly conclusive proof that such a boost indeed exists. I haven't seen it though, but I'm open to change my mind if someone has some real proof of that.
hyperbovine 17y ago
Really? I seem to have to weed through 15-20 Wikipedia ripoff sites just to find what I'm searching for these days. Occasionally they place higher than Wikipedia itself, somehow.
- chaosprophet 17y ago
  Are you by any chance talking about Wikia sites???

jacquesm 17y ago

You're placing the horse behind the cart. Google indexes websites, websites do not exist to be indexed by google. If another website will take wikipedias place in terms of quality and wikipedia will degrade then wikipedia will find that people will start linking to that other site. In time this will lead google to increase the ranking for these pages. Remember that google indexes PAGES not DOMAINS. So for every page that the new wikipedia contains that the old one does not the forked one gets right of way. It's not like wikipedia started off with millions of pages and lots of backlinks. The new project would be a fork in the open source sense, a new name with a fresh start and a chance to show how it can be done better. Its ability to lure people away from the 'old' wikipedia is what makes it go, the editors will determine its success, not google. And the chances of that success are simply a factor of how much time they put in collectively to make it different and better than the original.

barrkel 17y ago
There is, however, a network effect. I know I often link to Wikipedia because it's the first relevant link found in a search that contains a concise description of a concept that I don't want to define inline in my blog post / comment / etc. This would perpetuate Wikipedia even if it were completely unmanned and read-only.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Absolutely, they have a head-start. But given the fact that the future is literally infinite and wikipedia has only been around for a relatively short portion of that I think it is inevitable that at some point they'll be replaced by something better. If half the editors decide tomorrow to reboot then I don't doubt that given enough time they'll out-perform the infighters and the politicians. They'll have to be on guard against repeating the same mistakes from day 1 though to make it work.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Alas, I think the editors are the infighters and politicians.
natrius 17y ago
> Remember that google indexes PAGES not DOMAINS. Pages on .edu domains used to get a huge boost, and it's possible that they still do.
- Semiapies 17y ago
  I've never heard that. Can you substantiate that?
  - natrius 17y ago
    I don't think random SEO sites count as substantiation, but: http://www.lowprofilelinks.com/blog/?p=35 http://www.lowprofilelinks.com/blog/?p=35 http://www.articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/backlink-edu-power-with-links-and-guest-posts-1321865.html http://www.articlesbase.com/link-popularity-articles/backlin... Those only talk about inbound links from edu pages increasing one's PageRank, so maybe I was remembering incorrectly.
tptacek 17y ago
I'm not sure about your SEO policework here, Jacques. I'm pretty sure pages on Wikipedia do benefit from the cumulative pagerank of WP as a whole.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Unless google has tweaked their algorithm to give domains with a lot of high page ranked pages and automatic boost (and this may be the case but it has never ever been conclusively demonstrated) google is still indexing pages. There is a 'ban hammer' that has been applied to domains wholesale in the past, to give all the pages in a domain a PR of 0, but a PR boost across a domain has not been seen 'in the wild' as far as I know. A good test would be to find out-of-order wikipedia pages that have content that is clearly of lesser value than pages that are ranked lower. That would be fairly conclusive proof that such a boost indeed exists. I haven't seen it though, but I'm open to change my mind if someone has some real proof of that.

hyperbovine 17y ago

Really? I seem to have to weed through 15-20 Wikipedia ripoff sites just to find what I'm searching for these days. Occasionally they place higher than Wikipedia itself, somehow.

chaosprophet 17y ago
Are you by any chance talking about Wikia sites???