[WikiEN-l] Long-term searchability of the internet

[Newyorkbrad]

Interesting thread and questions.  A related question though is
whether unfettered eternal searchability of the Internet is
unambiguously a good thing.  Take the types of BLP, privacy, etc.
issues we deal with everyday on Wikipedia, and extrapolate them to the
rest of the 'net....

Newyorkbrad

On 1/14/11, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> (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 at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>