Media speculation and debate about Google and Wikipedia continues
Media discussion of the possible deal between Wikipedia and Google (see archived story) continued last week, with both skeptics and supporters weighing in on the implications of the relationship.
John C. Dvorak wrote an opinion column Monday for PC Magazine called "Googlepedia: The End is Near". Since it was an editorial rather than a news report, Dvorak didn't present any news that hadn't already come out, but simply presented an analysis based on existing reports. He speculated that Google might be "trying to corner the all the world's information" in order to sell it, or that they might take advantage of controlling access in order to lock out web crawlers from competing search engines like Microsoft.
Dvorak also drew a comparison to Google's acquisition of the Deja News Usenet archive, criticizing Google for contributing to the decline of Usenet and concluding, "This sort of collapse and sudden loss of interest does not bode well for Wikipedia ending up in bed with Google, or anyone else for that matter." He argued that even if the "nice guys" at Google didn't want to ruin Wikipedia, the fact of being a public corporation made it more or less inevitable.