So, Firefox 3 came out, and I've been playing with it. One of the things I found was a music addon that controls your default music player through FF itself. Among its other nifty features are the ability to quick find lyrics, pictures, video, the web, and the site of the plugin itself, which is fairly nice. However, clicking the quicksearch for "info" goes to the WP page of the band you're listening to. Or in the case of Journey, which was the fourth or fifth band I've checked this with, it goes to the disambiguation page. In the case of the metal band Lamb of God, it went directly to Lamb of God. Funny.


I'm not sure what to make of this. Foxytunes, the addon, appears to be made by Yahoo!. Kind of scary that WP seems to be a default for information.

It's still fun for playing music, I just found this a tad odd.

The dictionary program on some MACs does that too. Today was/is download day for firefox. We were all supposed to download today so they could beat a record- I did too lol, sad

Wonder if they beat it?

Indeed. That is why the Wikipedia Review exists! To warn the public that Wikipedia should not be the default of information.

Wouldn't bother me if they'd quit parading around like they're actually an encyclopedia, and admit they're a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

You're talking about FoxyTunes, right?

I don't see anything wrong with the link - Wikipedia is a top 10 site, and far outranks Britannica's visitor reach and scope (with the side-effect of unreliability) - hence why they use Amazon for shop links instead of, say, zavvi.co.uk, or Google instead of, say, Ask.com

Mods,

I think this thread maybe belongs in the Software Forum?

Jon

Well maybe Jon....

But it seems to have as much to do with somebody being foolish enough to use Wikipedia as a source for information as the working of Firefox, FoxyTunes or other software. The thread probably won't lead to much of a contribution to The Critique, but lots of threads don't achieve that aim.

No, the goal of this thread wasn't to bring about a massive revolution in the WP ranks, or, really, even fix anything. It was just something I noticed.
I think a better plan would have been trying to have the addon find the official site, somehow, instead of just flying to WP. I pointed out that the way it's currently using WP is a bit flawed, considering how many bands are named after other things. Journey, Poison, Queen, Cake, what have you.

I'm probably the least equipped of anyone here to accurately criticize WP. I don't edit and I read through for lack of things to do otherwise. I just lurk around here because it's more interesting to read the discussion than to take part, since I don't know shit. So I just thought I'd chime in on this one thing. I found it interesting.

I did too. I hope to read more posts from you and look forward to it.

It never does any harm to remind readers of the obvious (edit: or rather what seems obvious to us). After all, Firefox is the embodiment of the ethical fight against the Evil Empire, so for them to implicitly endorse Wikipedia with this feature means that the Republic has gone over to the Dark Side, even if they have not yet realised it.

It's clear that Yahoo Music is behind a lot of the information gathered by this little addon. So, for kicks, I looked into one of my favorite band's pages on Yahoo Music, and the FoxyTunes planet page. Here's the FoxyTunes page on Coheed and Cambria, track being irrelevant. Here's the Yahoo Music page for the same band. On both of those pages, you can see a link to the band's official home page.

Granted, their official page doesn't have a lot of actual info or history about the band, but the Yahoo music page offers at least a quick biography. Now, considering the amount of programming and effort put into this, to me, it seems almost lazy to write a little script that just searches WP for the band name instead of defaulting to the Yahoo Music bio or the official site of the given band.

And that's the problem, is even with incredible efforts of programming like this one is, for whoever wrote it all, it feels like they just gave up and decided to say "Well, fuck it, WP might know."

They say they did http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7462900.stm

Good for them!

There was no previous record for most downloaded software in 24 hours. There was something like 2.9 million pledged. They had a goal of 5 million. They got just over 8 and a quarter million downloads, but the results haven't been finalized, so the record has not been officially set.