Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-02-10/Special report

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The thing is, to be honest, does any of this drama matter? We all know what the end results are going to be. The WMF is going to do whatever the heck they want no matter what anyone else says, they'll spend a ton of time and money on a technical project in the face of opposition, they'll release "in beta" a broken, buggy version that sort of resembles what they promised to release, and years later it will still not be done and will get quietly shut down. For a non-profit that so desperately wants to be a "tech" startup, they have a terrible track record at actually producing usable software projects, much less managing their PR cleverly. --PresN 05:52, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It matters if the Foundation alienates enough volunteers that they quit & many or all projects -- Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Commons -- go into a death spiral. It doesn't look good if someone is known as the "ED that killed Wikipedia." -- llywrch (talk) 06:21, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@PresN: I would tend to agree, but I find two of the bullet points in the application worth serious attention. In section 4 ("Activities"), WMF lists as two of their initial tasks:

• Develop prototypes for evolving wikipedia.org, which will become the home of the knowledge engine.
• Answer this targeted learning question: Would users go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia?

From these two bullets, it appears that there is some sort of plan to release the knowledge engine as an overhaul ("evolution") of Wikipedia as a whole. If they follow the usual buggy, "in beta" pattern, it could be catastrophic. Even if the project is executed to perfection, there needs to be serious community discussion about "evolving" Wikipedia into "an open channel beyond an encyclopedia" (with this context, it seems clear that "beyond an encyclopedia" means "instead of just an encyclopedia"). It's a wee bit distressing that the WMF applied for and received funding to plan the fundamental transformation of Wikipedia.org without any community consultation. Or maybe I'm just reading it wrong. A2soup (talk) 06:29, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Last time I checked, Wikipedia was an encyclopedia with search capabilities, not a search engine backed by an encyclopedia. If the WMF wants to build its own search engine, so be it, but call it something else (Wikisearch?). MER-C 06:58, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Agree 100%. If they really want to leverage the name, they could call it "Wikipedia Search" or "Search by Wikipedia" and put it at search.wikipedia.org. They could even link it prominently on wikipedia.org. All of that would be fine by me. But let's leave the Wikipedia search box for searching Wikipedia exclusively, at the very least until the knowledge engine has been completed, rolled out, and proven to be successful over a period of years. A2soup (talk) 07:03, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The impression I get from the materials is that the public document access/updated search are just a part of the new framework. It looks as if the idea is to leverage the name/domain to attach to a GUI which accesses data from across Wikimedia's projects as well as certain other databases. But I agree that it does not feel like the right answer. This can only create confusion for users and volunteers alike, and who knows what the technical or community implications could be. Maybe there's something to this knowledge engine notion; it genuinely seems like something I might be very happy to see come to fruition. But sell it on it's own merit, with it's own domain/branding. It's notable that these documents present a great deal more focus on whether readers/end-users would react to the idea of a conceptual overhaul and facelift, and considerably less focus on how the community of volunteers would view the change. Mind you, I'm not the type to view absence of evidence as evidence of absence--that is, maybe it was paramount on their minds. But something just seems off in the way the WMF seems to be viewing this process, like they are putting the cart before the horse, in more than one respect. Snow ^{let's rap} 07:58, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure everyone here agrees that Wikipedia's search functionality isn't great, and spending some of this money to improve it is non-controversial. I wouldn't mind an additional sidebar on our search results that say "hey, Wikivoyage has a travel guide on X" or "Japanese Wikipedia has an article on Y" (in Japanese), but the full knowledge engine concept with its Google-like GUI needs to be a separate Wikimedia project with its own branding. "Wikipedia Search" or "Search by Wikipedia" are not sufficient because they dilute Wikipedia's brand and purpose, which is strictly to build a free content encyclopedia. MER-C 08:21, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm curious as to which community is being referred to when the June 24 attachment offers: "Open curation via vast, international community of editors." Does anyone know how the curation is meant to work?

I also wonder which advisory team is being referred to: "We’re focused on creating resources and tools for an open knowledge-engine community, and building on the input of an advisory team." SarahSV ^(talk) 07:41, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"However, these statements are flatly contradicted ..." - Uh-oh Mister Ranger isn't gonna like this, Yogi! (n.b., that's older US slang which means "The authorities shall be displeased by your bold action"). The above is excellent work overall, my compliments. But there's a bit of background context which would have avoided a slight misstep there. When they talk about NOT compete with Google, they mean they aren't building a complete-web database, funding by advertising, to try to get a piece of that amazing money-machine that's been mastered by Google (the amounts involved are enormous). Rather, they're focusing on a restricted segment, and going for a different strategy for support. Now, the following remarks are purely speculative and the product of a very jaded and cynical person. Given Wales's previous Wikia Search project, and the extensive Google connections with the current Wikimedia Foundation Board, I would be extremely wary that this project exists to help Google in further improving its search results (that's indeed not competing with Google!). The spam and junk battle is ongoing. If Google can get Wikipedians to "volunteer" to mostly work for free in refining algorithms and curation, aiding it even more than they do already, that's advantageous to both Google and the Wikimedia Foundation people (who will likely somehow eventually end up with tangible reward, while you will get the joy and happiness of having oiled the amazing money-machine, excuse me, helped distribute knowledge to the world). Perhaps the proponents of the project will say I am an idiot for such thoughts, but always ask, "Who benefits?". -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 08:00, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Quite right. I mused about these possibilities in last week's op-ed: Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-03/Op-ed. Have a look, Seth, if you missed it.

There is another related issue: while the example in the early mock-up shown above included a result from Fox News, it's unclear how that intent has evolved. More recent documents seem to indicate a search engine whose results include open-access sources only. Is that the intent today? (The answer will probably be crickets, but hey, it doesn't hurt to ask.) The notion of "disappearing" all copyrighted information from search engine results, creating a universe of knowledge that consists of freely copyable sources only, might be attractive to some (most of all Google and other Silicon Valley players, which would be free to reproduce salient bits of this content on their own search engine results pages and slap ads on it), but I'd find it a bit Orwellian. Andreas JN466 08:25, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent piece! I particularly liked the line about "unpaid hamsters driving the spinning cogs ..." with the picture of the "Volunteer". I obviously concur with your conclusions, though I take a somewhat more minimalist reasoning path based on the economics of search engines and the business models. Note I suspect the "open access" aspect is primarily not ideological, but pragmatic. Google Books has involved a long, expensive, copyright lawsuit. Outside the US, Google News is also embroiled with various disputes with copyright laws. The Wikimedia Foundation, even with its current budget, doesn't have the money to risk being a lawsuit target in such a dispute (those lawsuits are also matters of enormous amounts of money). -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 10:13, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]