January 23, 2009

Is Wikipedia Eating the World?

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IS WIKIPEDIA EATING THE WORLD?….Three years ago, Nick Carr did a Google search for ten topics off the top of his head. He found that Wikipedia entries were the #1 hit in two cases and among the top ten hits in all the others. Today he did the same searches again and found that Wikipedia was the #1 hit for all ten. This leads him to say this:

What we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia — and I admit there’s much to adore — you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

When I first saw this passage over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, I dismissed it. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to dominate the searches I do. Quite the contrary, in fact. Usually they’re only barely in the top ten.

But then I clicked the link and read Carr’s search results. Apparently, for searches of standard topics, Wikipedia is far more prevalent than it is for the kinds of searches I do, which tend to be fairly random assemblages of search terms. What’s more, my Google default is set up to return 50 hits per page, so even if Wikipedia is at or near the top, it’s only one of many hits. But if you use the standard Google search page, it’s one of ten. And if you routinely use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to go straight to the top hit, then Wikipedia rules. Carr, it turns out, has a more penetrating point than I thought. (On the other hand, he also has a vested interest in making this point since he’s on the board of editorial advisors of Encyclopedia Britannica.)

I’m still not sure what to think about this, but my guess is that way more people use Google his way than mine. And although I’m a big fan (and defender) of Wikipedia, which I think is a miraculously useful reference tool considering how it’s put together, I’m not quite sure how I feel if its hegemony in the search universe is really as complete as Carr suggests. So for now, I’m just passing this along.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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