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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.
Don't get me wrong, that's about all Wikipedia had going for it at one time. That and a meager couple thousand pages.
But I think Wales' search project should aim a little higher at this point in time
Also, maybe the reward system should be a little more tangible, like Wikipedia's? I mean, people get a kick out of seeing something they write benefiting everyone in the world. I personally don't get a kick out of knowing that if someone searches for 'Lola by The Kinks' it now comes up with more accurate results. I question the rewards although, to be fair, I also questioned the rewards of Wikipedia.
It shall be interesting to see whether or not this takes off. I encourage Wales to keep trying because even if this doesn't work, it certainly hasn't cost me anything. I wish him and his staff the best of luck!
My work here is dung.
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.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
That's not what that sentence says. What wikia has are buttons that try your search on other search engines. It's like Google having a button "try this search on Altavista". Not a great functionality on established search engines, but on a system like this, that needs to find it's place, it's a pretty good idea.
The main reason they're doing this, I imagine, is that they want to be people's home page, so it's a good idea to offer the same functionality as their previous homepage (eg. Google).
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.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Okay, we have all heard ten times now, that "Wikia is not affiliated with Wikipedia". Then, why on Earth does it use this name?
I know, I know, they do wiki-stuff and so on. But I can't help thinking that if anyone else besides Jimmy Wales had come up with that name, he would have a counterfeiting lawsuit at his neck right now.
I'm not sure it's such a good idea either. Forever, it will be "The-firm-that's-not-affiliated-with-wikipedia". I can already see the crowds of wikeeks (wiki-geeks. clever, I know) who'll slowly get horribly annoyed by having to explain this over and over again, once wikia does anything remotely bad (like loosing data, censoring, or some privacy cock-up), throwing a dark shadow on wikipedia.