Attention, please!
Wolfram Alpha is not a Google killer!
Wolfram Alpha is not a Wikipedia killer!
Wolfram Alpha does not want to dismember any company and bathe itself in its blood!
Please ignore unimaginative claims made by linkbait authors. Let’s forget the 1999’s prehistoric “me kill” mentality and focus instead on more peaceful opportunities. We now live in the age of mash-ups, so here’s my modest proposal for symbiosis between Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia.
The opportunity for symbiosis comes from their different strengths. Wolfram Alpha’s FAQ section gives a very clear description of how it compares to Wikipedia:
Wikipedia gives you pages of narrative about topics. Wolfram|Alpha computes answers to specific questions you ask, just giving facts, not narrative. Wolfram|Alpha often includes sidebar links to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia describes a concept; Wolfram Alpha gives you the ability to try out that concept in practice.
And because everything needs a car analogy…
Wikipedia is like a car magazine and Wolfram Alpha is like a car simulator. You can open a magazine and read more about a car you just took for a virtual test drive, or start with the magazine and go for a ride in a car you just read about.
You can see in the above quote that one-way links from Wolfram Alpha to Wikipedia already exist. What’s still missing are connections from Wikipedia to Wolfram Alpha, which might one day look like this:
A hypothetical Wolfram Alpha / Wikipedia mash-up. Click for full size.
There you have it. Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia can not olny coexist peacefully, they can help each other. No need to argue about who is going to kill who.
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