[zimbabwe]

life expectancy 40 year old male UK

GOOG YHOO

nathan name

president of nigeria 2004

weather seattle christmas day 2008

microsoft

ethnic groups nigeria

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.

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.

[Scriptor]

I tried "ethnic groups nigeria". Wolfram Alpha gave me a |-delimited string of them, Wikipedia gave me a much more comprehensive list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ethnic_groups_in_Niger...) and each one is a hyperlink.

Perhaps the author prefers to use Wikipedia for "facts and trivia", but I find myself enjoying the site for providing a detailed and thorough introduction to almost every non-trivial topic.

[zimbabwe]

That's what Wikipedia's good for. It's not nearly as good at what Wolfram is trying to do, which is to process and comprehend complicated data analysis. They're two entirely separate things.

[gyeh]

Try Wikipedia searches using Google:

"<query> site:en.wikipedia.org"

It enhances the Wikipedia experience to a whole new level.

[inerte]

The Nigeria ones are actually a good candidate to find on Wikipedia articles. I recently thought about moving to Norway and wondered how's the temperature there, if they speak english, and googled for "wikipedia norway". Country pages are a good source of that kind of information.

Anyway, the others aren't really good, since they're time-based, and except for major stuff (like the political history), Wikipedia isn't the right place to look.

But I disgress and agree, Wolfram isn't killing anything.