On 10/7/2010 6:09 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
"Booksellers" is obviously a bigger pool than social networking sites or microblogging services or what have you, but I can certainly see Paul's point here that it's opening us up to a lot of potential hassle, and a lot of fuss from people who have very strong incentives to get their service listed.
Hell yeah!
Looking up an ISBN code is an absolute nightmare on Wikipedia. Maybe I'm just a sell-out, but I usually go straight to AMZN, or maybe, just maybe, WorldCat so I can see if it's the public or Uni library in my town.
Same thing with the maps... Geodata in wikipedia is often crazy-wrong because nobody's gotten into the habit of looking at the points on maps. At Ookaboo
I display selected points from a dbpedia/freebase/wikipedia merge, and there are plenty of crazy errors (for instance, there's a faint mirror image of continental Europe with the sign of the longitude reversed off the coast of the British Isles, towns mingling with the shipwrecks.) If there was more of a focus on doing things one way correctly instead of not picking favorites, wikipedia users would be the winners.