[Search-l] Simpy Chichimichi - "Wikia Search - Not Happening"

[Stavros Macrakis]

On 4/29/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> speculating randomly when you are completely wrong and have exactly zero
> access to information.


So much for transparency, which I thought was one of the points of this
project.

Like others on this list, I'm not in a position to say that nothing is
happening on Wikia Search; what I can say is that I have no evidence that
anything is happening. The light traffic on this mailing list and the little
substantive material on the search Wiki certainly give no such evidence. The
absence of anyone from Wikia at the annual Search Engine Meeting (SEM) last
week in Boston, where lots of interesting work was presented -- including
groups like Exalead, Powerset, Inquira, and Choicestream -- gives no such
evidence.  The lack of any substantive information from anyone at Wikia
gives no such evidence. Of course, the lack of evidence is not the same
thing as the non-existence of the project.

What's more, despite the community having been asked to contribute to the
project, there is no channel for contributing. Consider my own situation. I
have some real experience in Web search, having been director of Search
Innovation at Lycos (which no longer does its own Web crawl) and responsible
for the MetaWeb Web mining project (which does) at Fast Search. At Lycos, we
worked directly with engines like Ask, MSN, etc., and spent a lot of time
listening to pitches from innovators. I got the Best Paper prize at SEM last
year for my work at Lycos. I'm quite familiar with Wikipedia, having
contributed thousands of edits and written tools to mine semantic relations
from it at Lycos.  And I'm also an active contributor to the open-source
Maxima project. So I am not a newcomer to Web search, to Wikis, or to open
source.  What's more, I am ready, willing, and able to contribute to Wikia
search. But I can't see any way to contribute to the Wikia search project in
a meaningful way (and yes, I have asked).

So all that is left for us on this list -- people who, as Aerik Sylvan says,
are a priori supporters -- is to speculate.  Not the sort of community
involvement I had in mind.

               -s
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