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I always thought it was a bad thing. I mean, here a for profit corporation is crowding all competition from the search engines, which are the modern gatekeepers of information. And we're transforming into an information economy. Wikipedia uses massive internal linking (2 million English articles), it's the default spot blogs link to when they want a topic explained to readers, and it gets covered a lot in tech news. They nofollow external links, except to other Wiki companies, like their search engine, their paid wiki hosting, and all that.
But on the other hand though, as long as you get an article that (1) isn't a stub and (2) hasn't been vandalized lately and (3) actually has good info, you've come to a free source that's probably going to satisfy your query. I think a lot of the other sites like Answers.com just scrape Wikipedia, plus any number of blogs and drive by spammers on forums.
So they've unfairly taken over the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, but that means whenever you Google something, it's a pretty good bet you have a real answer, instead of some MFA blog that uses the word a lot, but doesn't actually say anything about anything.
Is that good or bad for the internets?
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