what is the deal with this noise about content farms? A few years ago Wikipedia was a content farm for me - being very "on-topic" it polluted the search results and the few times i clicked on it i was very disappointed by the content. Fast forward to today - majority of my on-topic search ends with me happily reading Wikipedia. Either i became more stupid or Wikipedia content became much more better. I believe it is the latter :)
Isn't regurgitating content from elsewhere and slapping ads on it, is a content farm? Wikipedia can be a notable exception in that they've never served commercial ads (They had donation ads).
how about Wikipedia's "no original research" policy?
DemandMedia supposedly pays their authors for writing the pieces - which supposedly means original content.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not equaling current Wikipedia
and their overall great goal with DemandMedia. I'm just wondering - if the content farm hunt happened several years ago how would Wikipedia survived it.
>and slapping ads on it
well, i'm for one would like it if search engines rated lower any web pages with ads - more ads (like page real estate taken) - more scores taken out. It is like with Congressmen - more money in donations from Shell - less my trust that the Congressmen will support any anti-global warming efforts.
> how about Wikipedia's "no original research" policy? DemandMedia supposedly pays their authors for writing the pieces - which supposedly means original content.
I think you're equivocating over 'original' here. On Wikipedia, it means that everything you write is either directly sourced to another work or basic connective prose and obvious trivial inferences; it's a matter of citations and verification. With DemandMedia it simply means that the prose hasn't appeared elsewhere.
Surely that's not the complaint, here. Holding quality constant, ads will make a site better--for a low-quality site, they'll provide links to people who can actually solve whatever problem the site purports to solve, while for high-quality sites they help pay the bills.
Wikipedia improves over time (or at least attempts to). Because people put time and effort into it. Also, it keeps references and at attempts to be accurate. The aim is to create a wealth of information. Content farms are mostly the opposite. The aim is to make ad money. Making money isn't a sin but who are we kidding, one of these two generates quality content and the other one doesn't.
What kills me is that wikipedia scrapped content out of countless sites on places like geocities which are no longer around — so wikipedia gains the benefits from having the oldest page on said topic.
If you seriously believe that show the evidence. You have the geocities archive and the wikipedia dumps. I think you will not find thats where wikipedia was sourced from. For a start most of it was written much more recently than that.
