Failure mode
I love sensible licensing of user-generated content. I love creative commons. I love letting people re-packing information in new and useful ways.
But man, I really hate it when people re-package free information in completely useless and terrible ways. Case in points: lyrics. Searching for some song lyrics in Google, the first set I found had a clear error. The next four or five results, from completely different pages, had the *exact* same error. They were clearly all sucking in the same database and surrounding it with different obnoxious ads, then using every trick in the web-monkey book to boost their Google rank for hits. Drives me nuts. I had to go most of the way down the results page before I hit an actual second opinion.
I have no idea what the solution to this problem is, other than Google itself sorting up the better pages. It works with Wikipedia - there are other sites that repackage wikipedia in less-useful and more out-of-date forms, but everyone knows and links to wikipedia, so it gets better page-rank. But as in the lyrics example, when there's no really well-known *good* version, it's hard for Google to sort the wheat from the chaff.
But man, I really hate it when people re-package free information in completely useless and terrible ways. Case in points: lyrics. Searching for some song lyrics in Google, the first set I found had a clear error. The next four or five results, from completely different pages, had the *exact* same error. They were clearly all sucking in the same database and surrounding it with different obnoxious ads, then using every trick in the web-monkey book to boost their Google rank for hits. Drives me nuts. I had to go most of the way down the results page before I hit an actual second opinion.
I have no idea what the solution to this problem is, other than Google itself sorting up the better pages. It works with Wikipedia - there are other sites that repackage wikipedia in less-useful and more out-of-date forms, but everyone knows and links to wikipedia, so it gets better page-rank. But as in the lyrics example, when there's no really well-known *good* version, it's hard for Google to sort the wheat from the chaff.