Wikipedia's Search Engine Plan

jasonoik writes "Wikia, the commercial company founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, reveals plans for a new, editable search engine. They say that the goal of the project is to get 5% of the search market. The service does not yet an official release date. The article also leaves open the possibility that the search results may contain ads, and concludes by listing figures of the web advertisement market." Update: 03/11 17:24 GMT by KD : Wikia and Wikipedia are separate companies.

Comments

Fucking inaccurate

[Ignorant Aardvark]

Wikia is not the "company" behind Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation, is what's behind Wikipedia. Wikia is a totally separate for-profit company that is run by Jimbo Wales.

Re:Fucking inaccurate

[Eloquence]

As an elected Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, I can assure you that your opinion is incorrect. The Board of Directors of the Wikimedia Foundation has 7 members, of which Jimmy is one. He is the Chair Emeritus, which is a title we have given him to recognize his historic role, but which does not have any legal powers or responsibilities associated with it. The Chair of the Foundation is a nice French woman named Florence Devouard; I am the Executive Secretary.

As a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation also maintains a strict conflict of interest policy. So, Jimmy is not permitted to make any propositions which would advance the corporate interests of Wikia, and has indeed been completely excluded from discussions where his involvement in Wikia was relevant. (This, of course, also goes for any other corporate interests Board members may have.) In this way, Jimmy actually has less influence to promote Wikia as a Board member than he would have as a mere community member.

Jimmy retains some community influence specifically in the English Wikipedia, but that influence is not legally anchored. He speaks frequently to the English language press, though Florence has also done a lot of interviews lately. People seem to construct from this all kinds of bizarre conspiracy theories which have no basis in reality. This is a shame, because the WMF is truly committed to making the world a better place, and needs all the support it can get.

Re:Wikipedia's search sucks ass!

[binaryspiral]

The "search" function you use on their website is a known weakness because it relies on MySQL to perform the actual search. They didn't spend a lot of time developing it into something more useful than a basic word finder.

Even Wikipedia recommends using an external search provider for speed and customization of search topics.

Re:Wikipedia's search sucks ass!

[David Gerard]

There's a lotta extensions to help with CMS-like stuff - have a look around http://mediawiki.org/ and ask on mediawiki-l and http://mwusers.com/ .

Extensions are good because you can track the main releases and help make existing extensions to this end more robust, which is the secret open sauce.

WMF and Wikia share Mr. Wales

[tepples]

And it pisses me off to no end when we get lumped together with Wikia, which we really and truly have absolutely nothing to do with other than sharing the same wiki software And the same founder?