Foldoc Considered Harmful

FOLDOC, the FreeOnLineDictionaryOfComputing, is sometimes a handy resource for looking up technical words. However it suffers from some small problems, and one large problem that makes me wish it didn't exist at all.

The small problems: whoever is updating it seems to do so very slowly and erratically, so it's never a particularly up to date nor totally trustworthy source. Worse, it appears that different versions of it are updated independently. Is www.foldoc.org the "official" primary site? It's not always the one with the best most recent updates.

The huge problem: often web searches for some piece of software yield hundreds of hits on different foldoc sites, so that it's almost impossible to find a site with the software itself, or with a research paper. Trying to exclude foldoc hits with negative search terms is typically very difficult because there are so many foldoc variants.

Thus Foldoc makes some google searches essentially impossible to perform; the bazillion Foldoc variants become a black hole, that suck all searches into it.

So...Foldoc is evil!

Can't you just filter your search to not include pages with the word 'foldoc' in them?

• No, that absolutely does not work. I agree with the author of this page about the black hole effect; I've never found an effective way to escape the event horizon.

Try adding

 -"Try this search on Wikipedia"

to your Google search to exclude Foldoc pages.

• Did the author of that comment actually try it, or is that a random shot in the dark???

As a direct result of reading this page, I am slowly trying to get the FOLDOC mirrors shut down and redirected to the master site, http://foldoc.org/, which is always the most up-to-date. I'm sorry it's not as up-to-date as you would like but I use my limited time to apply submitted corrections, add the most requested missing terms and work on software to open up the editing process to more people. Sorry it's not as trustworthy as you would like. Feel free to submit corrections.

-- Denis Howe, FOLDOC Editor in Chief

---

CategoryConsideredHarmful