[WikiEN-l] MS using Wikipedia content

[phoebe ayers]

This might not be news but it was new to me.
Microsoft has developed a special portal for searching for health
information for its new "Live Search": https://health.live.com/, via
http://www.healthvault.com/.

When you search the web through this portal, Wikipedia articles are
prominently featured, along with other encyclopedic content from other
sources, in their own section called "articles".  For instance, run a
search on "cough" at https://health.live.com; an excerpt of [[cough]]
comes up. The links are live back to en:wp but the article itself is
cached by Microsoft.

I was told that they had a person (along with scripts) to go though to
pick out the relevant articles to load up; articles with cleanup tags
were rejected, though no quality or editorial control was done.
Apparently there is no provision for updating the articles over time,
however. For the cough example above, the version used by MS seems to
be from early January (around January 1) and includes a rather
questionable paragraph that was subsequently reverted.

Particularly worrying for health content, perhaps....

-- phoebe