To take a specific example, I very occasionally come across names of people or topics where it is next-to-impossible to find out anything meaningful about them because the name is identical to that of someone else. Sometimes this is companies that name themselves after something well-known and any search is swamped by hits to that well-known namesake. Other times, it is someone more famous swamping a relatively o bscure person - a recent example I found here is the physicist Otto Klemperer. Despite having the name and profession, it is remarkably difficult to find information about the physicist as opposed to the composer. If I had a birth year, it would be much easier, of course.

(Following on from another thread) I have a theory that Wikipedia makes only *part* of the Internet not suck. Wikipedians aggregate online knowledge (and offline as well, but let's stick to online here), thus making it easier to find information about something, especially when there are lots of ambiguous hits on a Google search and you don't know enough to refine the search. But the useful parts of the internet (i.e. not the social media and similarly non-transient information-deficient areas of the internet) didn't stop growing when Wikipedia came along. In theory, if the growth of the information-dense parts of the internet has continued to outstrip the growth of Wikipedia and the ability of Wikipedians to aggregate that knowledge base, then large parts of that part of the internet should still "suck" (to continue using that terminology) - i.e. be less amenable to searching due to absence of information or poorly organised information. I base this on many years of searching daily for information about topics ranging from the well-known to the borderline obscure to the outright obscure. Over the years since Wikipedia started, the ability to find information online has changed beyond recognition. Around about 2004-5 (I need to check dates here), Wikipedia was rising rapidly up the search rankings, and now comes top or near the top on most searches. But there are still many, many topics on which no articles, or only redlinks, exist. I come across these daily when searching, and see that information on these topics is out there, scattered around if you search on Google, but hasn't been aggregated yet. The question I have is whether the growth in the amount of unaggregated information (and I include other information-organising sites here, not just Wikipedia) will always outstrip the ability of various processes (include the growth of Wikipedia) to aggregate it into something more useful? If the long-term answer is yes, then information overload is inevitable (and search engines will gradually start to suck again). If the long-term answer is no, then at some point the online aggregation (or co-ordination of data to form information in the real sense) will start to overtake the flow of information from offline to online, and order will continue to emerge from the (relative) chaos. The key seems to be the quality of the information put online. Well-organised and searchable sites and databases are good. Poorly organised information sources, less so, as while they can in theory be found by search engines, they may be less easy to distinguish from the background noise, though it also depends greatly on the amount of information you start with when carrying out a search for more information. To take a specific example, I very occasionally come across names of people or topics where it is next-to-impossible to find out anything meaningful about them because the name is identical to that of someone else. Sometimes this is companies that name themselves after something well-known and any search is swamped by hits to that well-known namesake. Other times, it is someone more famous swamping a relatively obscure person - a recent example I found here is the physicist Otto Klemperer. Despite having the name and profession, it is remarkably difficult to find information about the physicist as opposed to the composer. If I had a birth year, it would be much easier, of course. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l