Microsoft Bing rehosts Wikifiddling as 'Reference' material Update: This story has been updated with comments from Microsoft. We all know that Google's search engine likes to push Wikipedia links to the top of its results pages. But Microsoft has gone a step further. With its new Bing decision engine search engine, Redmond is reproducing Wikipedia entries in their entirety, pulling …
Surely the rights to change licensing still belongs to the people that provided the material and edits and Jimbo has no authority to change the licensing to a different open source license any more than he has the rights to change it to a closed source license.
I used to like this Internet thing. Now thanks mostly to Google, Wikipedia, Blogs, and Ubuntu forums, it's impossible to find /anything/ at all.
Google insists on bumping Wikipedia entries, doesn't differentiate between the quintillion copies of any given press release that end up on blogs, word-for-word, ranks forum posts, and seems to give priority to older information. That means when I look for information that was just spewed across the net a week ago in a press release, all I get are copies of a press release on a similar topic from a year ago. And when I look for trouble shooting info on say, nVidia Linux drivers, I get forum posts from 2002. That sort of thing is completely useless, but that's all you can get in the first page or two. And starting around page 3 you get mostly completely unrelated pages.
I know you can get Google to narrow down the time range, but there's no selectable time range between 1 week and 1 year. That seems to be a mighty large jump, especially when I'm looking for information about an event that happened a month ago.
Google is clearly just phoning in their search these days. It got them started, but now it's not nearly as important as whatever the hell else they're doing in those data centers.
We need one of those startups from a couple Stanford/MIT Grads/Dropouts to come by and develop an Internet search for today's trashed up content, and we need them not to get bought my Google before they release a useable tool. Of course, the chances of that happening are as rather slim.
@ Charles Manning
" Surely the rights to change licensing still belongs to the people that provided the material and edits and Jimbo has no authority to change the licensing to a different open source license any more than he has the rights to change it to a closed source license. "
Here, have you edited Wikipedia?
Anyone fancy initiating a class-action lawsuit for copyright infringement?
Now that would be fun!!!
I wonder how i) predictable and ii) frequent their wiki page fetching times are? I hope it's not "very" and "not very" respectively.
7:59 "Evolution" edited by DarwinSucks
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8:00 "Evolution" refreshed by MS search
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8:02 "Evolution" edited by DSmith (reverted edits by crackpot)
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8:59 "Evolution" edited by notamonkey
Anyone who thinks ANY reference material is beyond question has no business citing (or even looking at) it. This is the true strength of Wikipedia - it reminds the sensible that all information (yes, even in old fashioned print) is unreliable. Those who are not sensible enough to realise this aren't worth bothering with anyway. Yes, I know that includes hoardes of journos and other pundits, but it is still the truth.
The cool thing about the internet is that there is no barrier to publishing.
The bad thing about the internet is that there is no barrier to publishing.
There is just so much crap out there and anyone with an opinion feels they have a right to spout their feelings as fact. Unfortunately there is no indication as to whether the comments are from a rational person of a nutjob.
A few days back I was trying to see what theories there were as to what happened to the water that supposedly flowed on Mars. How can a planet that formed vast amounts of water suddenly lose the water? I chanced upon a discussion thread on some physics forum. Aha! Some sense here! Nope... some idiots saying things like "Mars lost its gravity".
Want to know if cellphones fry your brain? You'll soon come to a "Russian scientist's" website showing cellphones cooking eggs and the like. He must be the real deal - he's even wearing a lab coat!
And don't get me started on global warming!
Sure print media such Britannica etc has errors but at least there is effort to use reasonable sources and verify them.
Is when Microsoft's black-ops FUD department wikifiddles the ODF and OOXML articles to make themselves look super innocent and smelling of roses, then snapshots *those* wiki pages, neglecting the later updates that show the lies, FUD and dirty tricks used by them in the international standards process.
For example.
Gotta be Steve, hasn't it?
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