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September 17, 2006

Testing Wikipedia

Testing Wikipedia: Tim Bray starts with a vanity search at Microsoft, and ends with the question "How can you find the correct statistics for the populations of each of the Canadian provinces?" He points out that using Wikipedia gives an idea of what a fact might be, but that the accuracy of such facts is difficult to determine. Tim then tries to navigate the web, by visiting the websites of each of the ten provinces. It may be faster to use the leads which Wikipedia provides, and then search for corroboration. For instance, in Google, using search term "wikipedia canada population province" has a top hit of the Wikipedia listing. To confirm this info, you'd take unique text which must be in any confirming document, and search on this... I used "'newfoundland and labrador' '2001 census' 512,930". Doing a second search, without the editable stat, will show if there are larger results for some other statistic. We don't need to totally believe or totally disbelieve documents on the web -- it's possible to play them against each other, to get a better idea of the situation out there. Wikipedia is useful as a suggestion of authority -- use it as a set of tips for subsequent investigation. Tim closes with an argument that each of the ten provinces should have an identical navigational structure and URLs, but life is messy, and people work in groups of different scale at different times -- it would be nice if they all eventually used similar directory structures, but in the meantime....

Posted by JohnDowdell at September 17, 2006 05:02 PM

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"Tim closes with an argument that each of the ten provinces should have an identical navigational structure and URLs, but life is messy, and people work in groups of different scale at different times -- it would be nice if they all eventually used similar directory structures, but in the meantime...."

Not an area of provincial responsibility; search on "statistics canada population provinces". Knowing something about the subject helps define a useful search. Not sure how far search on the web can go in helping those who start a search from zero.

LTM

Posted by: L. Thomas Martin at September 17, 2006 08:37 PM