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

[Tony Sidaway]

I think the point is being missed. Wikipedia does not set out to
manipulate search engine results, that's just a happy accident of its
content being pretty good and many search engines weighting its
content appropriately.

We make the internet not suck by putting the information on our
website, maintaining it and permitting its re-use and modification
subject to a reasonable licence.  Our method of organization is thus
an alternative to using a search engine. It's far more modest than
google because it's not trying to aggregate everything that's out
there. People work on what they find interesting and use the resources
they know about.

All anybody needs to know is: Wikipedia exists and it can be found by
all decent search engines.  Its content is indexed by the same search
engines so it's easy to narrow down a search to prioritize content
from Wikipedia.

I remember talking to a TV journalist about 15 years ago, no stranger
to online life. When I said how useful I found Altavista, the Google
of its time, he lamented that it didn't work, because new websites
were being created so quickly there was no possibility it could ever
keep its indexes up to date. Again; completely missing the point. We
don't need to be able to find every single thing on the internet, only
the useful stuff.  A huge amount of the useful stuff is on Wikipedia.