[Search-l] Welcome! And, the current status!

[Jimmy Wales]

Goodness, massive buzz in the news and blogosphere this weekend, 
including some very confused stuff.

Here is where we currently stand... some servers are being ordered, and 
I am happy to give access to developers who I know personally or who 
come recommended by someone I know personally.  I know a lot of people, 
so if you know anyone who is anyone in the free software world, that's 
not a huge limitation. :)

We have an old codebase of mine from when I was working on this kind of 
concept a couple of years ago, at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikia/

What parts we might end up using of this old code, I don't yet know. 
Since I was doing that work, Nutch and Lucene have matured immensely and 
frankly, there is a lot of stuff that my code did not even contemplate 
doing which is now possible.

The press coverage this weekend has been a comedy of errors.  Wikiasari 
was not and is not the intended name of this project... the London Times 
picked that off an old wiki page from back in the day when I was working 
on the old codebase and we had a naming contest for it.  Nice name, 
though, so we might as well use it for the codename of the software. :)

And then TechCrunch ran a screenshot of something completely unrelated, 
thus unfortunately perhaps leading people to believe that something is 
already built about about to be unveiled.  No, the point of the project 
is to build something, not to unveil something which has already been 
built. :)