Last year, a self-proclaimed ‘Google-killer’ was launched – Cuil. They came out with huge bang, which quickly fizzled into a farce, and they have pretty much dropped off the radar. Apart from making riduculous claims, they also made a large number of technical mistakes which caused a lot of angst amongst web-masters around the world. All in all, Cuil has pretty much dropped out of the media, and doesn’t really factor in any discussion on search.

Last week saw a very different launch of a rather different search engine – WolframAlpha. Despite the media attempting to label it as another ‘Google-killer’, the developers and team behind it were very careful to show how their search engine would be different from Google and not in direct competition.

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A couple of years ago I found myself heavily involved in the Scouting WikiProject at WikiPedia and I was enjoying immensely. Not only was I helping to produce the articles on WikiPedia, I was learning a lot about Scouting and related topics from the research I was undertaking to provide the references for the myriad facts that contribute to the knowledge there.

Then life took a turn, as it does, and I ended up moving to Australia, and had to focus on other things for a while, so I became less active.

I figured I’d have a start again, and started to help the project again by tidying the wild bunch of UK Scouting articles, since they had only a handful of non-American contributors.

It was a very short time before I became extremely disabused of the idea that everyone is out to build a better knowledgebase.

It seems in the year or so between my activities on WikiPedia, there are a growing number of “editors” whose only substantive contributions are to mark anything they can get their hands on for deletion, and then bully the decision through despite the protests of the project members – not only in Scouting, but in many other topics around the site.

I know that I had marked some articles for deletion when I was active, and agreed with other recommendations for this – but mostly only after ensuring that the content was covered elsewhere in a more appropriate context. The new wave of deletionists don’t seem to care about information, just in a twisted wielding of power – simply deleting a photograph without offering an alternative, or speedy deleting an article (an often abused method of bypassing any discussion) without ensuring that relevant content was placed elsewhere as a subsection. And then these editors would accuse that project members were “biased”, instead of simply being more knowledgeable about the topic.

Added to that, and the US-centric fights were still going on over my break, as well. I had thought that we had sorted that out before I had left last time, and a large number of articles were becoming generalised where appropriate, and clearly marked as US-only for the other cases. A year later, and I was finding more and more articles discussing US-only Scouting as if it applied around the world.

My second (albeit short) stint collaborating with the project just didn’t light the fires of my interest to overcome these issues within the masses of contributors at WikiPedia.

I’m wondering if this is a universal problem, where other editors have just said “enough” – or if it is simply the fact that I had a large gap in my time there?

It’s a shame – because I really did enjoy that first time. But I guess I have enough of other things to do for now.