[Search-l] Introducing Wikia Evolution

[Jimmy Wales]

Aerik Sylvan wrote:
> And the bots and widgets are all well and good, but I think I'm really 
> asking about an API - whether it's official or unofficial.

It's official but currently unstable, I guess I would have to say. :)

> I mean, on the negative side, sooner or later spammers will write 
> automated scripts to try to game the search index, whether you give them 
> a formal API or not.  I'm sure just looking at the ajax in the website 
> or the source of the toolbar would yield the information needed to 
> automatically send entries (unless they're protected with captcha - I 
> haven't tried the toolbar yet).

No protection yet.  And this is like the ability to write a bot for any 
wiki, and the solution in my mind is to block ip numbers or throttle 
submission rates, and also to have the admin tools (coming soon) to 
instantly revert with one click all the changes within a certain time 
period from a certain account or ip number.

The design philosophy is "accountability not gatekeeping".  The design 
philosophy is to not solve problems until we actually have them ("avoid 
excessive a priori thinking" is how I usually say it).

If things got really bad, then I would suggest the following sorts of 
protections:

1. you can only submit through the toolbar api if you are logged in
2. you can only submit through the toolbar api at a certain reasonable 
human rate
3. you can apply to the community for a bot flag to be set that removes 
those thresholds if your idea is deemed sensible enough

> So, what I'm thinking, is you're going to have to fight that battle 
> anyway.  There are also good players who would be happy to share their 
> human generated keywords and urls with the index in a semi-automated 
> fashion - thus my social bookmarking example.  Every bookmark would make 
> the index smarter, but wikia itself would not have to become a 
> bookmarking application.  This is not so much a bot or widget, as an API 
> call.

Totally.

--Jimbo