[Search-l] Any updates?

[Bani]

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 7:10 PM, Rainer Blome <rainer.blome at gmx.de> wrote:
> Personally, I think this is not the most important deliverable any more.
> Admittedly, there is no finished formal policy.  But the existing
> discussion itself together with the odd forum entry or two serves as a
> working, de facto guideline. Given that the frequency of Wiki changes
> has gone down to a single-human level, it is not that pressing.

You are right. I pointed the policy discussion as something important
because that was directly related to what most people were working at,
and, as I mentioned in the forum before, if each person started doing
wiki editing their own way we wouldn't be able to achieve a standard
and it'd be harder to keep the consistency in the long run. But now
that there is a much smaller group working in the wiki we could say
that the people involved have come to an agreement about what to do in
the wiki. It is just a little hard for someone who wants to start
contributing to find that information, so having a condensed version
of the policy would be nice.

> These policies are more important than the mini article policy, in my
> opinion, because they apply to the entire search infrastructure, not
> just the wiki.

Right, that would be a way to know how to move forward.

> These policies can be developed by a community, but ultimately, they
> need backing by the owners. It might provide some motivation to
> potential policy developers if the owners gave any indication of whether
> the policy development is going in a direction that is acceptable for them.

Well, it's been four months since the launch. Jimmy Wales hasn't said
a word here in the last three months. Neither did Angela (except for
the news about the two new admins, one that I sent her an email
requesting to give him the admin status and the other being a person
who the only thing he ever did was creating an account and requesting
the admin status on the first days). But her last useful message was
addressed to you:

"Rainer,

You are the owner! Not just you, but the entire community.

Wikia isn't running this community top-down. It's really in the hands
of the community to develop policies about the content there. Wikia
staff are always on hand to offer advice, but we wouldn't even try to
tell you how to govern yourselves. That is something the community
will evolve over time."

So I think they will accept whatever the community accepts. I'm much
more concerned about Jeremie Miller accepting what other people come
up with, because he is the one most actively involved and also the
person (probably among others) who can commit the code and launch it
in production. And I think he is doing a great job at that, both with
his code and with giving some feedback to what is happening, but we
still need more communication with the delevopers. And I think he
likes coding more than he likes talking, otherwise I'd just "vote for
him" to be the boss... hehe

> Wikia, and Wikia Search with it, is a corporate endeavor.  The authority
> people are there, but they currently choose not to act, apparently.
> Wikia Search looks free, but isn't.  They can pull the plug at any time.
> As long as this is so, I invest only a little time in it.
> Some others see this the same way, at least it appears this way to me.
> In the long run, we need an independent, not-for-profit search
> infrastructure, similar to Wikipedia.

Well, that is a bit tricky... but I see people contributing to other
open source projetcs that are controlled by a single company (example:
OpenSolaris), so I don't think this is a factor to determine Wikia
Search's failure.


Bani