[Search-l] Automatically linking to Wikipedia

[Alex Halavais]

The irony here is that Google already links to Wikipedia for most
searches of article titles (headwords). Just try searching Google for
"Monkey", "Kevin Kline" or "triglycerides" and you find the Wikipedia
entry in the first few hits.

Which, frankly, makes sense. It reflects a useful resource for most
people who are searching using topical terms that are the names of
Wikipedia articles. A better question may be where those Wikipedia
entries will fall in Wikia's results among results once Wikipedia is
included in the index. Adding a link to Wikipedia automatically seems
pretty moot if the first link among the results will be to Wikipedia
once the index is plumped out.

But, then, that really brings up the question of the raison d'être of
the Minis. I don't mean to be negative (especially since that doesn't
seem to be allowed ;) ) but they really feel like a feature in search
of a need. Is the model Knol with peer editing? Or About.com v2. Or
Yahoo/DMOZ v2. Or??? Wikipedia started with a model of articles in
people's head: the encyclopedias they had used throughout their lives.
Of course that model evolved and became more specific over time, but
at least there was a core central idea. Without a clear direction, I
doubt there will be rapid convergence toward a consensus on what they
are supposed to do. And if that idea already exists, it needs to be
more clearly communciated.

- Alex


On Jan 8, 2008 12:39 PM, Bani <borboleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> I like the idea of linking better than fetching the content.
>
> My suggestion is: for mini-aticles that don't exist but are on
> Wikipedia, we suggest it as a source of information to start a new
> article. And even when the mini-article already exists, we could have
> something like a "see also [link to wikipedia] for more information".
>
>
> On Jan 8, 2008 2:41 PM, Mark (Markie) <newsmarkie at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > i think if its possible we should maybe do something that fetches the
> > content from the wikipedia page of foo (obv for the search term of foo)
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