swa66 - 11:31 pm on Oct 6, 2008 (gmt 0)

I do have a problem with how wikipedia handles references.

If some of the powers that be come around a page and for some reason (like having ads on a site apparently) don't like the granddaddy site that existed long before they themselves were invented. They don't hold back to REMOVE existing references, and replace them with "better" ones. Now the "better" references point to things made after their article existed, and match their content better (guess why that is :-( ) ....
[If you have an academic background this should make you even more weary of wikipedia, referencing sources isn't something you mess with in that world]

I've also an issue with their users adding pointless links and then not the users getting banned, but the site that is pointed to getting banned and loosing its links like in the above scenario. If you have competitors listed in wikipedia, this makes it trivial to get them banned on wikipedia.

I understand letting people anonymously edit anything is a recipe for disaster if you don't control it properly, but they aren't doing it properly in my book. They also are next to impossible to confront (it's all anonymous, even the administrators of it all), and they don;t really bother to justify their actions.

Add to it that they get plastered all over the SERPs, the gray masses don't know better and things like wikipedia will kill off the Internet as we know it and turn it into a place where people publish stuff exclusively on a few sites like wordpress, picasa, youtube and wikipedia in addition to corporate sites and parked domains.

I doubt many webmasters will truly appreciate such a future. Hence I think we need to take care where we point links and avoid those sites at all.

Equally I'm wondering how long before people will realize they might as well skip the "google" step and search directly on wikipedia. Hence I've a bit of a strange feeling for the future in that for Google just as well. Search engine might go the way many a "portal" went in the past.