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Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

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Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#171

Post by boomzilla »

newscracker wrote: post #145
jarcane wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't even find anything in my own posts . If it's a permission problem, that's a pretty fuckin' serious permission problem right there. On top of which, Graph Search is still disabled inexplicably in many regions, for reasons which were never explained.

> It can't even find anything in my own posts. Ditto. I have seen this as a crippling deficiency in the Facebook platform. Not being able to search properly in my own posts or in the groups I'm a member of really sucks. For all the engineering prowess, open sourced tools, etc., shown by Facebook, the lack of a working search makes the company seem incompetent from the top down. Sometime ago I started storing importan…

FB search is terrible because there is no incentive for an engineering team to work on it, and in fact maybe quietly discouraged from doing so. FB make money on from the news feed, so any feature that distract users from scrolling down their feed will come up losing on an A/B test where ultimate metric is ad views and clicks.

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#172

Post by coldpie »

chris_wot wrote: post #168
coldpie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's super weird. I'm usually pretty understanding of corporate communication, especially when it's going to be public, but those paragraphs are just bizarrely phrased. "Ideation," "retrospecting", "beings," "universe," frequent references to a "rocket." It reads like one of those crazy-people websites from the 90s with a dozen different fonts.

Her native language is Russian and country she was born in was Russia. I always assumed that was the reason the language used is like this. I've been critical of her "rocket" imagery, but I like to think I'm understanding about the odd use of English in the rest of her comments. Especially as I'm a monolinguist, heavens only knows how I would sound if I tried to learn and speak Russian amongst Russians...

Thanks, I did wonder if she is a native-English speaker or not. It didn't have any of the telltale grammatical or sentence construction errors, just really weird word choice.

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#173

Post by jonathankoren »

chris_wot wrote: post #159
jonathankoren wrote: post #127

I've read a log of the inside wikimedia links here, and I'm confused about all the talk of gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth. This is controversial because some want to pay down technical debt rather than have a small team do knowledge graph search? Okay...

It's not a small team compared to the size if the organisation. And you mischaracterise the situation: this is a problem with engagement, transparency and openness.

Yeah the relative merits of the initiative seem to be besides the point. If you have a toxic environment, even a proposal to cure all disease for everyone for free will attract derision.

It's hard to get worked up over some other team's morale. If its such a crappy place, just quit. The could probably literally go across the street and get a new job. I don't really care. It's all way too inside baseball for me.

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#174

Post by chris_wot »

jonathankoren wrote: post #173
chris_wot wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a small team compared to the size if the organisation. And you mischaracterise the situation: this is a problem with engagement, transparency and openness.

Yeah the relative merits of the initiative seem to be besides the point. If you have a toxic environment, even a proposal to cure all disease for everyone for free will attract derision. It's hard to get worked up over some other team's morale. If its such a crappy place, just quit. The could probably literally go across the street and get a new job. I don't really care. It's all way too inside baseball for me.

You cared enough to comment. This wasn't just a place of work for me, I volunteered my time because I believed in what they were doing.

You might never have contributed in a significant fashion to Wikipedia and other WMF projects, but I did. Sure, I didn't get employed, but then again I know a lot of people I met and have continued to be friends with who are still deeply involved. You may not care about your friends' morale, and you might think it's easy for people to "go across the street and get a new job", but then you seem like a pretty thoughtless person.

Of course, you've not understood at all what the larger issues are. You must have a bit of a comprehension issue, because I supplied quite a few links that you apparently read that explained the underlying problems.

Just remember though: you don't care :-)

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#175

Post by nickpsecurity »

chris_wot wrote: post #168
coldpie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's super weird. I'm usually pretty understanding of corporate communication, especially when it's going to be public, but those paragraphs are just bizarrely phrased. "Ideation," "retrospecting", "beings," "universe," frequent references to a "rocket." It reads like one of those crazy-people websites from the 90s with a dozen different fonts.

Her native language is Russian and country she was born in was Russia. I always assumed that was the reason the language used is like this. I've been critical of her "rocket" imagery, but I like to think I'm understanding about the odd use of English in the rest of her comments. Especially as I'm a monolinguist, heavens only knows how I would sound if I tried to learn and speak Russian amongst Russians...

That makes sense. Could be. I'm with you on heaven knows how retarded I'd probably sound trying a foreign language haha.

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#176

Post by jonathankoren »

chris_wot wrote: post #174
jonathankoren wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the relative merits of the initiative seem to be besides the point. If you have a toxic environment, even a proposal to cure all disease for everyone for free will attract derision. It's hard to get worked up over some other team's morale. If its such a crappy place, just quit. The could probably literally go across the street and get a new job. I don't really care. It's all way too inside baseball for me.

You cared enough to comment. This wasn't just a place of work for me, I volunteered my time because I believed in what they were doing. You might never have contributed in a significant fashion to Wikipedia and other WMF projects, but I did. Sure, I didn't get employed, but then again I know a lot of people I met and have continued to be friends with who are still deeply involved. You may not care about your friends'…

0) Stop with the personal attacks. It's rather unbecoming, and I don't appreciate it.

1) Being genuinely confused about what the big deal isn't the same thing as caring. It's asking for confirmation of a conclusion.

2) If you're in a situation where you're unhappy, then you have a responsibility to make yourself happy. Staying around in a crappy situation and whining about doesn't help, and neither does insulting people.

3) Wikimedia is in San Francisco. If I had to take a guess, I would say there was a literally a hundred other tech organizations in that city alone, including nonprofit organizations with a societal purpose. 18F comes to mind. Again, See 2.

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#177

Post by chris_wot »

jonathankoren wrote: post #176
chris_wot wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cared enough to comment. This wasn't just a place of work for me, I volunteered my time because I believed in what they were doing. You might never have contributed in a significant fashion to Wikipedia and other WMF projects, but I did. Sure, I didn't get employed, but then again I know a lot of people I met and have continued to be friends with who are still deeply involved. You may not care about your friends'…

0) Stop with the personal attacks. It's rather unbecoming, and I don't appreciate it. 1) Being genuinely confused about what the big deal isn't the same thing as caring. It's asking for confirmation of a conclusion. 2) If you're in a situation where you're unhappy, then you have a responsibility to make yourself happy. Staying around in a crappy situation and whining about doesn't help, and neither does insulting peo…

0) you don't seem to realise how you come across

1) you literally wrote "I don't really care".

2) they aren't whining. Saying so is pretty much a personal attack. It's certainly insulting. I don't appreciate it, and I'd say neither do they. Funny how that works both ways.

But interestingly enough, as has been pointed out already - people ARE leaving in droves.

I'm no longer involved in Wikipedia, but I can still be unhappy with the direction they are taking.

3) if you think that just leaving a non-profit you have emotionally invested in is an easy decision, then you really haven't thought things through. If you think it's elementary to just step out of one job and into another, that's also thoughtless.

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#178

Post by greglindahl »

marincounty wrote: post #128
NKCSS wrote: post #125

Weird; they have anual drives to raise money to keep the site running; would not expect that the'd have 2.5m lying around to do pet projects like this...

Most non-profits, especially the ones that are always asking, usually have a lot of funds. Before I give, I go to guidestar, hit free preview(they try to trick you into a paying membership), download last few years of 1040's, and see if everything looks copacetic. I look at who is making the most money. Their is usually one person making a very good living. California non-profits are much easier to scrutinize than De…

FWIW the archive has a lot of 990s archived at [1]. We love Wikipedia, why not donate to both? :-)

[1] https://archive.org/details/IRS990

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#179

Post by greglindahl »

contingencies wrote: post #75
abalone wrote: post #38

Summary of the approach (p10): "1) Public curation mechanisms for quality; 2) Transparency, telling users exactly how the information originated; 3) Open data access to metadata, giving users the exact date source of the information; 4) Protected user privacy, with their searching protected by strict privacy controls; 5) No advertising, which assures the free flow of information and a complete separation from commerc…

1) Public curation mechanisms for quality; The Mozilla / open directory project tried this. Curation doesn't scale and often assumes a single unifying ontology. This is particularly problematic in a cross-cultural context. Besides, 'quality' is not a unidimensional metric in a result set: consider timeliness, authority, notability, uniqueness, comprehensibility, etc. 2) Transparency, telling users exactly how the inf…

Curation scales for some topics. It was hard to build a curated list of Linux sites, they come and go. But there are only a couple of new good, comprehensive health websites per year.

I was Blekko's founder/cto. And it's worth noting that our founding team was the Open Directory Project's founding team. Blekko's curation data was even better than dmoz in its day. Check it out: https://github.com/blekko/slashtag-data

Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]

#180

Post by Animats »

abalone wrote: post #95
contingencies wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Public curation mechanisms for quality; The Mozilla / open directory project tried this. Curation doesn't scale and often assumes a single unifying ontology. This is particularly problematic in a cross-cultural context. Besides, 'quality' is not a unidimensional metric in a result set: consider timeliness, authority, notability, uniqueness, comprehensibility, etc. 2) Transparency, telling users exactly how the inf…

> Curation doesn't scale and often assumes a single unifying ontology Wikipedia is a pretty big exception to that assertion. Perhaps DMOZ (a clone of Yahoo circa 1996) is not the only way to do curation. Perhaps Wikipedia could apply what has worked for Wikipedia, i.e. develop a set of POV-neutral criteria for organizing collections of links and then invite everyone to participate. It's really easy to be negative. Bu…

There was a remark recently that most Jeopardy answers are Wikipedia titles. Consider Wikipedia as an ontology, with Wikipedia titles as the vocabulary. A search engine could associate articles with relevant Wikipedia titles, and try to do the same with queries. The first step of search is then relatively straightforward.
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