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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget that Google once tried to kill Wikipedia with their own proprietary project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol). Really happy that was a failure.

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Is it impossible to attempt to innovate in a space without being accused of trying to kill the space's current leader?

(googler, but had never even heard of knol until now)

When Google innovates, it’s usually in a vein attempt to kill competitors in a place where it sees an opportunity for more revenue. Competition from Google is hardly ever fair (despite most of their projects being spectacular failures regardless.)

So no it’s not impossible, but it’s always gonna happen when it’s Google/Amazon and the “innovation” is a free alternative to a successful independent business.

> When Google innovates, it’s usually in a vein attempt to kill competitors in a place where it sees an opportunity for more revenue

Isn't that how everyone innovates?

(FWIW: you meant "vain", I think, but that doesn't seem like the right word either. Maybe "arrogant" was the spin you wanted?)

Vain seems like an appropriate word to use, when interpretated as "producing no result; useless"

That is, after all, the end result of many of Google's attempts at dominating a space. Their love of shutting services down will likely make further future dominations of new fields even harder.

No, but when a company has a history of trying to completely dominate every space it goes into, it's a fair assumption.

Google was considering Wikipedia as main competitor in the late 2000s and the whole "content is a king" mindset. So yeah.

Wikipedia itself is of course just an iteration on Everything2.

https://everything2.com/

A similar vintage, but slightly younger than everything1 was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2 / https://www.h2g2.com/

Ha! Glad to see H2G2 come up. Lots of great moments there!

That shareholders don't really own Wikipedia doesn't necessarily mean it's entirely 'better' than it would be otherwise.

As the top commenter noted, there are problems.

Though it would be sad if a commercial entity put Wikipedia 'out of business' per say, I think 'more variety' in this space would be welcome.

I'd have no problem looking to different sources for a more authoritative source of information.

For example, maybe Unis get together to publish their own wikis on more academic subjects. Maybe companies can have a Wiki to make their own articles about their own articles (I understand they have web sites for that, but the Wiki format is different).

More variety would generally be better not worse.

> ...For example, maybe Unis get together to publish their own wikis on more academic subjects. ...

There's nothing stopping them from doing this. Wikis are actually a nice example of a federated standard, with good support for "InterWiki" cross-linking, well-understood naming conventions (thanks to Wikipedia) for encyclopedia-like articles, and open licensing via CC-BY-SA.

And shuttered Freebase. Similarly, Apple used Openstreetmap to get their mapping effort off the ground and then didn't contribute back. I understand the profit motive for both of them, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

Apple doesn't contribute back? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18913408

> Apple employee spoke at a recent OSM conference. Yes, they use OSM data as well. In some countries more than others. Apple also has a fulltime staff working on OSM. https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues, https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/

I asked a friend at Apple and there are apparently like 15 people working on it, which is a $2-3M contribution.

Apple is replacing OSM and all other sources with its own private maps. https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps/

That article is not remotely the whole story.

Apple uses OSM data in many parts of the world where their own mapping efforts will likely never reach.

Mr O’Beirne’s articles are very US-centric.

> Apple uses OSM data in many parts of the world where their own mapping efforts will likely never reach.

And contributes nothing to those, instead opting to build their own maps in the important markets.

Apple does pay people to make edits to OSM: https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/

Only in markets where it matters, which means they will stop making those edits after they replace OSM with their own maps.

O'Beirne's article is US-centric because Apple's rollout is US-centric (California, Nevada, and Hawaii only for now).

Unfortunately, that’s the deal with open source - you have to expect that people will use your work in ways you may not like. License your stuff accordingly.

AIUI, Freebase was not "shuttered" - it was used to seed Wikidata, a Wikipedia sister project which makes its data available under permissive CC0 licensing.

It was shuttered. You can no longer contribute to Freebase. Wikidata used some data from the last Freebase triples dump, but Google is not contributing its updates to either, despite using Freebase's crowdsourced work to seed its internal knowledgebase.

Once again, I understand the profit motive. I just don't like it.

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