Wolfram Alpha: The Wikipedia Killer

A lot of the mathematical proofs and descriptions of algorithms on Wikipedia are surprisingly well written. You're telling me Wolfram Alpha can replace that? In fact, Wikipedia is a completely different type of service.

<i>life expectancy 40 year old male UK</i><p><i>GOOG YHOO</i><p><i>nathan name</i><p><i>president of nigeria 2004</i><p><i>weather seattle christmas day 2008</i><p><i>microsoft</i><p><i>ethnic groups nigeria</i><p>With the exception of Microsoft, none of these are questions I'd see myself typing into Wikipedia. Some of these might have tangential information available on Wiki, but this is not Wikipedia's meat and bones.<p>Wolfram Alpha is not going to kill anything. It provides a new kind of service, and if it becomes popular the only deaths will be of those services that offer very limited value to begin with.

If you read "%s Killer" anywhere on a news site, you can safely ignore it.

I don't see WA as a Wikipedia killer. It's more like a working version of Wikipedia articles: read about a concept on Wikipedia, then try it out in practice using WA. I think they complement each other very nicely!

XXX is the YYY killer is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong, esp. if YYY is good and thriving. (Hardware notwithstanding.)

I'm getting very tired of the "Sorry, Wolfram Alpha is temporarily unavailable. Please try again." or "I'm sorry Dave".<p>Regardless of whether or not it's "released". It is "released" and I'll be avoiding it until it's less frustrating to use.

It's the first time i hear about the site: It's great and promising. however if i happen to use it a lot in the future (and may be several times a day) it'll not replace Google.<p>This is not exactly an engine, it's a precious scientific tool<p>edit: i looked for Google and this showed me the last trade in our local currecncy (DT)!! this mean they have care about visitors from all over the world

Wikipedia is one of the main source of data for Wolfram Alpha, so killing Wikipedia would make Wolfram suck if not die.

Not only are the different things but it will take either a lot more time or a lot more effort before Wolfram Alpha can compete with the amount of information that Wikipedia has.

No, not even remotely:<p><a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ruy+lopez" rel="nofollow">http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ruy+lopez</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_Lopez" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_Lopez</a>