On 4/29/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jimmy Wales</b> <<a href="mailto:jwales@wikia.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">jwales@wikia.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote">
</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">speculating randomly when you are completely wrong and have exactly zero access to information.
</blockquote><div><br>So much for transparency, which I thought was one of the points of this project.<br><br>Like others on this list, I'm not in a position to say that nothing is happening on Wikia Search; what I <span style="font-style: italic;">
can</span> say is that I have no <span style="font-style: italic;">evidence</span> 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.
<br><br>What's more, despite the community having been asked to contribute to the project, there is no <span style="font-style: italic;">channel</span> 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).
<br><br>So all that is left for us on this list -- people who, as Aerik Sylvan says, are <span style="font-style: italic;">a priori</span> supporters -- is to speculate. Not the sort of community involvement I had in mind.
<br></div></div><br> -s<br><br>