Listen to this March 20th CalacanisCast interview with Andrew Lih, author of a forthcoming book (the first, surprisingly) about Wikipedia. Then go check out Mahalo again, Jason Calacanis’s new well-funded “human-powered search” project that currently has the blog world perplexed. Suddenly it becomes clear: Jason wasn’t able to convince the Wikipedians to let him help monetize Wikipedia’s search, so he’s building his own for-profit mini-Wikipedia lite.

Wikipedia articles are in a sense “human-curated SERPs” (search engine results pages, for those who don’t speak acronym) that happen to show up very high for a plethora of Google searches. Mahalo wants to join them for the top 10,000 search terms, and sell ads.

Mahalo is not so much a search engine or a directory or an “expert guide” site, it’s a mini-Wikipedia run by paid editors (Mahalopedians?) designed to be accessed the way the majority of internet users come into contact with Wikipedia: through Google searches. Eventually a few people may actually start their search at Mahalo, if they hear the “we offer Google results for stuff we don’t have, so what do you lose?” selling proposition enough times.

Note that if Wikipedia was a private company, it would be worth billions.

I still prefer Wikipedia. But Mahalo’s not going away.