I’ve used Wolfram|Alpha for some in the past, but when it comes to actual, useful information, I can’t get it to give me much. It’s not hard to see why there aren’t results for every potential query: most people have strange interests and the few people behind the scenes at Wolfram|Alpha probably aren’t as weird as the rest of us. As clever as their software might be, it’s not going to anticipate people with strange hobbies. What does one do in that case?
There are two choices: they can ignore the weirdos and leave their computational knowledge engine to normal people, or they can take a lesson from Wikipedia, which allows people with weird hobbies to create articles of interest to them (and possibly nobody else).
I’d like to see someone make a version of Wolfram|Alpha that allows the public to go in and edit the functions that compute results. Give it Wikipedia-like version control, allowing users to add or improve existing functions, while someone using the site for computational purposes and do so without ever seeing the code. The hard part, I expect, would be figuring out which function to summon given a particular query, but there are ways to deal with that.
Any thoughts? Do you use Wolfram|Alpha? Do you find it satisfactory? Would you use an open version?
