11 February 2005

Convergence of source material

Google Inc. has made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.

I had recently commented on the importance of Wikipedia as a universal source of reference (irregardless of its failings). If you need an external definition for a Web document because an inline definition would be too extraneous, you should use Wikipedia as a first source. I suspect that Google may be looking to integrate this principle in their search results. They already have the very useful define: operator (I regularly use that when faced with unknown or technical lingo). Wikipedia entries could be used to give a richer set of results for that--maybe a wikipedia: operator.

[ via BoingBoing -> Wikimedia ]

[ posted by sstrader on 11 February 2005 at 2:13:34 PM in Culture & Society ]