[WikiEN-l] Just how powerful is Wikipedia?

[Harry Willis]

Well, blunder of the day: typed a very similar reply, in all its glory,
sent it off and then realised I'd sent it from the wrong account, it got
bounced by Mailman, and I've lost the original. Bugger. Ah well, here goes
for a second try...

The actual results of the rankings analysis don't surprise me, if only from
personal experience. It's logical that due to Wikipedia's wide article base
and high site ranking, that there will be popular articles on the more
popular search terms. However, on popular searches with many relevant site
hits, Wikipedia often doesn't make it into the top 5, lingering around on
the first page of results but not always having a top-3 or even top-5
ranking. I guess not even enwiki gets carte blanche...

On the political bit of the article, to be honest (and again, I'm speaking
from little more than experience), people researching current events and
other currently relevant and rapidly changing information, they tend to
reach for links to trusted online news sources rather than Wikipedia
articles. Also, the Google News search feature knocks Wikipedia out of the
equation altogether when it's used. The political COI edits are a perennial
subject for journalists and technology commentators, but if people use
Wikipedia as their sole source for current events, then they should
probably be expecting a certain deal of information lag or the odd factual
inaccuracy. Caveat lector, as always.

If anyone could find me the link to the site which displays anon
contributions by IPs in US gov't address pools, I'd be eternally grateful -
I appear to have lost it without a trace!

- H


Usamah M. Ali [usamah1228 at gmail.com] wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> SitePoint's lead blogger Josh Catone published a very interesting blog
today about the powerfulness of Wikipedia entries in search result pages.
You can read it here:
> 
> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/09/04/just-how-powerful-is-wikipedia
> 
> Regards,
> Usamah