Omegatron wrote:
Good. Wikipedia needs to be shaken up a bit. :-) I suspect Google's software and interface will be orders of magnitude more usable that ours, and attract more non-technical users, which will in turn promote pressure to get more developers to fix up the site. Competition should be welcome.
My hope from all this is that it will renew our appreciation for some of the coverage Wikipedia gives to pop cultural and "low-notability" topics that have been under steady pressure from merging and deleting for a long time now. It's true that our quality is sometimes lacking on these areas, but they're topics that people actually want to read and come to Wikipedia looking for information on. It's silly to shoot ourselves in the foot by turning them away.
Hey, if they improve on Wikipedia, they deserve any user migration they get, and humanity will be better for it.
Indeed. Depending on the final details of their policies, of course, I might be inclined to add a few articles I know of that have been pointlessly trimmed down to nothing on Wikipedia. I'm not interested in the revenue, just in making the information we've buried in old revisions "live" again.