Wikia Search Upgrades Get Closer

Barence writes "Wikia Search has been revamped with a wealth of editing tools, to build on its early promise of being a more open search engine. The firm behind Wikipedia has introduced a wealth of editorial tools allowing users to directly edit and annotate results with text, images and links, as well as spotlight specific searches or even delete a site from the search results, a change which affects everyone who conducts that search in the future." Update: 06/04 17:32 GMT by T : Jimmy Wales wrote to point out that despite his role in founding Wikipedia, Wikia is a completely separate company.

Comments

"Open"

[Anonymous Coward]

delete a site from the search results, a change which affects everyone who conducts that search in the future

So it's possible to define censorship is "open" now? Awesome.

And, Yes Yes. I know that one can go to some effort to determine whether a result has been censored and Undo It Yourself in the manner of Wiki. But how is it that you need to have expert knowledge in order to get uncensored information? Is that not the definition of elitism?

Re:"Open"

[iago-vL]

You're assuming that it'll be censored and say that way. I doubt that'll be the case -- if a user "censors" something, just like when a user vandalizes Wikipedia, it'll likely be reversed fairly quickly. It would surprise me if this became an issue.

Re:"Open"

[nahdude812]

Except that we know many admins on Wikipedia have repeatedly abused their position to advance a point of view on a topic - sometimes even for a topic they have a vested personal interest in - and suppress an opposing view.

Who's to say that when an admin of Wikia Search also owns one or more sites in a given category, they won't use their power to repeatedly squash their competitor sites? And that when it comes up for review, their you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours admin friends won't be there to defend them?

Jimbo needs to do a lot of work in regard to increasing visibility of administrative process, and addressing administrative abuse (his typical response has been to blindly defend his admins).

If he doesn't, abuse will become a lot more rampant, a lot more widespread, and a lot more subtle since now we're talking about something which can directly affect profits of a company and those of its competitors.

Problems?

[Archangel Michael]

as well as spotlight specific searches or even delete a site from the search results, a change which affects everyone who conducts that search in the future." Anyone else see anything wrong with this?

I want my results to be as agnostic as humanly possible, which means keep human hands out of my results.

The problem with this type of search is that those with agendas will control the results. While I may like the agenda or support it, I don't want to limit what I see to just my POV. There are too many people who can't think beyond their own little world.

I don't want Scientologists skewing results. I don't want Bush Bashers skewing the results anymore than Obama Haters. I don't want KKK results being skewed up or down because of an agenda (or two).

I want to see Huffington Posts along with Michael Savage. The moment someone starts monkeying the results, the agnostic nature of searches goes away, and the search will become useless to me.

Re:Problems?

[Kingrames]

The way I see it, it's no more censorship than letting everyone who searches say "that has nothing to do with what I was searching for" and actually seeing the computer respond.

I'm fairly certain that if the people you mention DO engage in dubious practices like that that their accounts will be banned, their efforts undone, and their changes revoked.

Then, in accordance with the Streisand effect, everything they hoped to accomplish will fail and backfire.

Re:Problems?

[owlnation]

I'm fairly certain that if the people you mention DO engage in dubious practices like that that their accounts will be banned, their efforts undone, and their changes revoked.

Well if Wikipedia is the model then, yes that will certainly happen. After all, Wikipedia has blocked entire countries' IP addresses on the whim of Jimmy Wales.

The problem is... define "dubious practices".

Wikipedia blocks for "vandalism". But has never satisfactorily defined what that is -- often in practice it's disagreeing with the cabal that runs a page who is either an admin or has their view supported by an admin.

I see no reason why this will be any different here. Given Jimmy Wales's well documented dubious financial dealings and ethics, no doubt sites like answers.com, wikipedia itself, or other sites where he has a vested interest, will get priority regardless.

Based on the Wikipedia example, I can see no way in which this search engine could ever be trusted.

Re:Problems?

[pablomme]

All Data is touched by Humans, so that is a specious argument. It's not, it implies that it's not a matter of whether the data is human-provided or not, but of what amount (and type) of human implication is involved.

Clearly WikiaSearch will need anti-spam and anti-censorship measures, but it may well be feasible to make it a good search engine.

The problem IMO is that the quality of the search results is affected by the popularity of the search engine, and the popularity of the search engine is affected the quality of the search results. So for this to work they need a good basic search algorithm to start with. Notice that the success of Wikipedia was possible because there were no other (popular) online encyclopedias available. Not the case of search engines.

Will use for one purpose

[JD-1027]

Whether I find it useful as a search engine or not, I will find at least some gratification in that I can do nothing but delete all search results from experts-exchange.com

Yes, I'm bitter, I can't count the number of wasted clicks on their search results from google. Now that google cache doesn't work with experts-exchange, it is nothing but a time waster.