So, ok, I know people have different opinions about Wikipedia (I'm STILL looking at (and loathing) you, Andrew Keene!), but I think this is a pretty good plan right here. You know how Google gets its results to be all handy and relevant? Right, you don't -- nobody does except Larry Page and he's not talking, cause those algorithms are mighty valuable.
So what if instead of writing an algorithm that would somehow rank pages in the right order of relevance without ever looking at them, you just got the whole Wiki universe to actually look at search results and tell you which ones were right? Cause, you know, we don't have anything better to do, and we have a lot of free time.
And what's the point of doing this, when we already have Google and it rocks, whereas this project is going to take a really long time to be good, assuming it ever happens? Well, nobody knows how pages get ranked. And while Google continues to not be evil so far, they are pretty neatly taking over the whole fucking world, and I don't know how long that's going to last. And if they started tweaking their algorithms so just the opinions and articles and products they wanted you to see started coming up, and you had no way of knowing they were doing it? Well, you don't need to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to see where that might be bad.
But even if you have perfect faith in Google, transparency is still always a good thing. You should know how things get made, even sausages and laws (maybe you shouldn't be eating those sausages if they're so fucking gross to make, hmm?). So knowing exactly how my search engine works and what goes into its rankings is something I'd rather know than not know, you know?
In short, fuck ignorance.
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