Is Wikipedia getting into social networking?
We've been hearing bits and pieces of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' big plans for a search engine for a while now. But it's never been entirely clear how this human-powered search engine would look. Would it be more like Google or Mahalo?
South African blogger Matthew Buckland raises a third option that we hadn't considered. It could look a lot like Facebook.
Last night Wales showed a few screenshots of his new search project to a South African audience. Buckland was in attendance, and he says some of the screenshots looked exactly like Facebook profile pages. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that your search results are going to take you to social networking style pages. Honestly, that doesn't even make much sense. If you're searching for information on Abraham Lincoln, you probably don't expect to find his MySpace page.
So these screenshots could just be showing the user profiles of Wikiasari editors. But considering how many people read and edit Wikipedia every day, we could easily see any sort of social networking component growing pretty big and fast. And without Facebook-style advertising.
see also some earlier news-
What can I say... I am very happy about this move of Wikipedia! Otherwise there was no much space for it in the 2.0 world of today, full of new great services, platforms and projects.
I did not clearly understand one thing- if they're talking only about Social Networking extensions for "people read and edit Wikipedia every day", or in general about all people...since later they speak about a new advanced web search engine- "Wikipedia is based on a million trained monkeys (that'd be you) constantly updating an online encyclopedia. Why not apply that method to search results?". We'll see it!
And one thing is true- it will be very difficult for Wikipedia to compete with the projects like Spock, which is already a Global Who's Who 2.0!
Look- Are you on Wiki? me- not :( But just check if you are presented on Spock, or download permanently Spock's Search Bar extension for your browser. I bet 99% that you are :) 
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