The “Useful references” sticky at the top of this forum is somewhat staggeringly lacking a link to Wikipedia in the on the entire first page, which is, frankly, an inexcusable omission since I’d bet wiki is the number one linked site on the boards (followed by the IMDB, and then Amazon. But I digress.)
Anyway, according to Wikipedia itself, it went online in January of 2001. The “Useful References” sticky was started in October of 2002, and Wikipedia itself is not mentioned by anyone in the thread until June 2003- a full two and a half years after Wikipedia went online.
The board members here are usually pretty on the ball about this sort of thing, so that tells me that Wiki obviously wasn’t quite as useful in its early days as it is now. (I’d be willing to be that a large number of the linked sites in the Sticky have been rendered obsolete or abandoned due to Wiki’s prominence nowadays, incidentally.)
So, the question I have is this: When (roughly) did Wikipedia become the standard “Go-To” place for general information on the Internet (after Google, of course)?
I’m guessing around 2005-2006, but that’s really only an educated guess…
Right: Mathworld, for instance, is probably still a better resource for mathematical concepts than is Wikipedia, but most people need to look up definitions of words a lot more often than they need to look up explanations of mathematical concepts.
Yeah, I dunno; on those rare cases where Wikipedia isn’t sufficient, I generally go to PlanetMath, but I can’t remember the last time I found something on MathWorld that wasn’t better explained on Wikipedia. But it may depend on what particular kinds of math one is looking at, and of course, there is a subjective aspect as well… so, whatever.
I thought Wikipedia really entered into it’s own when Google changed it’s ranking to put WP pages first. Or was that a result of it becoming more reliable?
I believe Google ranks websites based on how many other websites link to that site. So Wiki sites became higher ranked when other people began to link to those articles.
I feel so old, fielding a question on internet history. There were some great reference websites online in the late 90s, including print reference giants like Encyclopedia Brittanica and the Oxford English Dictionary. Most of these were subscription based (and they still are).
Professional researchers still use proprietary sites (like westlaw, proquest, etc.) because they offer more primary sources.
And because their content can’t be changed by any pinhead who’s feeling ornery.
I check Wiki probably daily, on average, and it’s both fun and fascinating, but I would never rely upon it for academic or work purposes. It’s just too unreliable by its very nature.
Another point in favor of the proprietary sites is that with specialization comes better ways to organize the data. For instance, the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Data Service does synonym matching on searches, so a search for, say, “sun” will also return abstracts containing “solar” or words with the “helio-” root. A non-specialist site like Google Scholar can’t do that as easily, because they don’t know what all of the synonyms are in astronomical jargon. Google is quicker and easier to use, but when it really matters, I still get better results from sites like ADS.
