Wolfram Alpha: The Wikipedia Killer

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2009/05/16/WolframAlphaTheWikipediaKiller.aspx

by darwinw • 17 years ago

17 21 17 years ago

25hoursaday.com

zimbabwe2• 17 years ago

life expectancy 40 year old male UK

GOOG YHOO

nathan name

president of nigeria 2004

weather seattle christmas day 2008

microsoft

ethnic groups nigeria

With the exception of Microsoft, none of these are questions I'd see myself typing into Wikipedia. Some of these might have tangential information available on Wiki, but this is not Wikipedia's meat and bones.

Wolfram Alpha is not going to kill anything. It provides a new kind of service, and if it becomes popular the only deaths will be of those services that offer very limited value to begin with.

inerte• 17 years ago

The Nigeria ones are actually a good candidate to find on Wikipedia articles. I recently thought about moving to Norway and wondered how's the temperature there, if they speak english, and googled for "wikipedia norway". Country pages are a good source of that kind of information.

Anyway, the others aren't really good, since they're time-based, and except for major stuff (like the political history), Wikipedia isn't the right place to look.

But I disgress and agree, Wolfram isn't killing anything.

gyeh• 17 years ago

Try Wikipedia searches using Google:

"<query> site:en.wikipedia.org"

It enhances the Wikipedia experience to a whole new level.

Scriptor• 17 years ago

I tried "ethnic groups nigeria". Wolfram Alpha gave me a |-delimited string of them, Wikipedia gave me a much more comprehensive list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ethnic_groups_in_Niger...) and each one is a hyperlink.

Perhaps the author prefers to use Wikipedia for "facts and trivia", but I find myself enjoying the site for providing a detailed and thorough introduction to almost every non-trivial topic.

zimbabwe2• 17 years ago

That's what Wikipedia's good for. It's not nearly as good at what Wolfram is trying to do, which is to process and comprehend complicated data analysis. They're two entirely separate things.

tsally• 17 years ago

A lot of the mathematical proofs and descriptions of algorithms on Wikipedia are surprisingly well written. You're telling me Wolfram Alpha can replace that? In fact, Wikipedia is a completely different type of service.

nx• 17 years ago

I really want to believe that, but we'll have to check later on. I'd like to see the OS community triumphing over commercial solutions.

russell2• 17 years ago

XXX is the YYY killer is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong, esp. if YYY is good and thriving. (Hardware notwithstanding.)

harpastum• 17 years ago

As much as I don't think WA is a Wikipedia killer, I think that simply writing off emerging technologies that are attempting to replace the status quo is naive at best.

If you're commenting on the actual phrasing of the article title, rather than the sentiment behind it, you're probably right. But I would push that assertion even farther: Link-bait article titles are 'pretty much guaranteed' to contain information that's either incorrect or obvious.

russell2• 17 years ago

Right. I was going after link bait titles as a guarantee of little content. The true killers are usually not apparent in the early stages. Was it obvious that Google was the AltaVista killer? AltaVista had the brand name, a big parent company, and lots of smart people. WA is interesting on its own without all the "killer" blogs.

nimbix2• 17 years ago

I don't see WA as a Wikipedia killer. It's more like a working version of Wikipedia articles: read about a concept on Wikipedia, then try it out in practice using WA. I think they complement each other very nicely!

nimbix2• 17 years ago

UPDATE: threw together a simple mock-up of what WoframAlpha inside Wikipedia might look like: http://bit.ly/3PHMD

The content and position of a WolframAlpha block would be selected by article authors. Considering how much space it eats up, it probably wouldn't be expanded by default, but it certainly needs to appear inline. If there was just a link to this simulation in the footer section it would be almost invisible.

Also, another shameless act of self-promotion: http://bit.ly/FT0qj (full blog post)

patcito• 17 years ago

Wikipedia is one of the main source of data for Wolfram Alpha, so killing Wikipedia would make Wolfram suck if not die.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

I doubt if the loss of Wikipedia would affect Wolfram Alpha. they'd just license the information.

travisjeffery• 17 years ago

Not only are the different things but it will take either a lot more time or a lot more effort before Wolfram Alpha can compete with the amount of information that Wikipedia has.

cellis• 17 years ago

If you read "%s Killer" anywhere on a news site, you can safely ignore it.

jimbokun• 17 years ago

Agreed that Wolfram Alpha will not kill Wikipedia, but it is unfortunate that some interesting points are associated with such a link-bait title.

Using FaceBook for people searches, Twitter for "what are people saying right now" searches, and Wolfram Alpha for CIA World FactBook searches does demonstrate the potential for vertical search services to thrive in the shadow of Google. If services that are better than Google for some narrow kind of search continue to proliferate, collectively they could become a competitive threat to Google at some point. Or at least threaten some potential Google growth opportunities.

I though Dare made this point rather well, and I think it is worth further discussion.

csomar• 17 years ago

It's the first time i hear about the site: It's great and promising. however if i happen to use it a lot in the future (and may be several times a day) it'll not replace Google.

This is not exactly an engine, it's a precious scientific tool

edit: i looked for Google and this showed me the last trade in our local currecncy (DT)!! this mean they have care about visitors from all over the world

darkxanthos• 17 years ago

I'm getting very tired of the "Sorry, Wolfram Alpha is temporarily unavailable. Please try again." or "I'm sorry Dave".

Regardless of whether or not it's "released". It is "released" and I'll be avoiding it until it's less frustrating to use.

erlanger• 17 years ago

No, not even remotely:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ruy+lopez

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_Lopez

Wolfram Alpha: The Wikipedia Killer

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