Wikia Search Upgrades Get Closer 57
Barence writes "Wikia Search has been revamped with a wealth of editing tools, to build on its early promise of being a more open search engine. The firm behind Wikipedia has introduced a wealth of editorial tools allowing users to directly edit and annotate results with text, images and links, as well as spotlight specific searches or even delete a site from the search results, a change which affects everyone who conducts that search in the future." Update: 06/04 17:32 GMT by T : Jimmy Wales wrote to point out that despite his role in founding Wikipedia, Wikia is a completely separate company.
"Open" (Score:1, Interesting)
So it's possible to define censorship is "open" now? Awesome.
And, Yes Yes. I know that one can go to some effort to determine whether a result has been censored and Undo It Yourself in the manner of Wiki. But how is it that you need to have expert knowledge in order to get uncensored information? Is that not the definition of elitism?
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You're assuming that it'll be censored and say that way. I doubt that'll be the case -- if a user "censors" something, just like when a user vandalizes Wikipedia, it'll likely be reversed fairly quickly. It would surprise me if this became an issue.
Re:"Open" (Score:4, Interesting)
Who's to say that when an admin of Wikia Search also owns one or more sites in a given category, they won't use their power to repeatedly squash their competitor sites? And that when it comes up for review, their you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours admin friends won't be there to defend them?
Jimbo needs to do a lot of work in regard to increasing visibility of administrative process, and addressing administrative abuse (his typical response has been to blindly defend his admins).
If he doesn't, abuse will become a lot more rampant, a lot more widespread, and a lot more subtle since now we're talking about something which can directly affect profits of a company and those of its competitors.
Closer to What Exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, that's about all Wikipedia had going for it at one time. That and a meager couple thousand pages.
But I think Wales' search project should aim a little higher at this point in time
Also, maybe the reward system should be a little more tangible, like Wikipedia's? I mean, people get a kick out of seeing something they write benefiting everyone in the world. I personally don't get a kick out of knowing that if someone searches for 'Lola by The Kinks' it now comes up with more accurate results. I question the rewards although, to be fair, I also questioned the rewards of Wikipedia.
It shall be interesting to see whether or not this takes off. I encourage Wales to keep trying because even if this doesn't work, it certainly hasn't cost me anything. I wish him and his staff the best of luck!
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BTW: There seems to be some confusion about Wikia and Wikipedia. Short info:
* Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that uses MediaWiki and is run by the Wikimedia Foundation
* MediaWiki
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Perhaps "closer to actually being useful?" I hadn't tried it before, but clicked the link to it from TFA.
I wanted to find the aging but still humorous "police warning" about the new date rape drug "beer". So I luugged in "date rape" beer. None of the first page results returned a copy (there must be hundreds) of the document I was looking for.
Google had the one I was looking for at the top of its list. Wikai search still has its work cut out for it. A search engine
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Well, maybe the reward could be search results which YOU find relevant.
I think Wikia Search could be even mor
Problems? (Score:5, Interesting)
I want my results to be as agnostic as humanly possible, which means keep human hands out of my results.
The problem with this type of search is that those with agendas will control the results. While I may like the agenda or support it, I don't want to limit what I see to just my POV. There are too many people who can't think beyond their own little world.
I don't want Scientologists skewing results. I don't want Bush Bashers skewing the results anymore than Obama Haters. I don't want KKK results being skewed up or down because of an agenda (or two).
I want to see Huffington Posts along with Michael Savage. The moment someone starts monkeying the results, the agnostic nature of searches goes away, and the search will become useless to me.
Re:Problems? (Score:4, Informative)
Good. Have fun searching spam.
Seriously, even Google's PageRank stuff relies on "human hands" placing links to documents on web pages.
Re:Problems? (Score:4, Informative)
From Wikipedia
Re:Problems? (Score:4, Informative)
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Data that is massaged by humans to get a certain result is tainted. Which is one of the flaws of PageRank system. I didn't say PageRank was perfect, just about as good as it gets.
The point is, whenever someone learns how to game the system, it will end up like when PageRank gets exploited by irrelevant websites pointing to each other.
I prefer a system where gaming the system is less likely. The approach here is to actually game the system.
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All Data is touched by Humans, so that is a specious argument.
It's not, it implies that it's not a matter of whether the data is human-provided or not, but of what amount (and type) of human implication is involved.
Clearly WikiaSearch will need anti-spam and anti-censorship measures, but it may well be feasible to make it a good search engine.
The problem IMO is that the quality of the search results is affected by the popularity of the search engine, and the popularity of the search engine is affected the quality of the search results. So for this to work they need a
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I think a moderation system that's less digital would be better.
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Spam won't simply disappear if you let humans edit the results.
In case of Wikia Search a spammer can edit the search results deleting the competition and he will be the frist match for a search for a short period of time until his edits are reversed.
If the search engine has lots of users then even this short period of time can be very profitable and brings in thousands of visitors.
I wonder how they will fight it. Delayed propagation of edits into the search results is no good
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I'm fairly certain that if the people you mention DO engage in dubious practices like that that their accounts will be banned, their efforts undone, and their changes revoked.
Then, in accordance with the Streisand effect, everything they hoped to accomplish will fail and backfire.
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Well if Wikipedia is the model then, yes that will certainly happen. After all, Wikipedia has blocked entire countries' IP addresses on the whim of Jimmy Wales.
The problem is... define "dubious practices".
Wikipedia blocks for "vandalism". But has never satisfactorily defined what that is -- often in practice it's disagreeing w
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These people can take actions such as setting a site's pa
can also use google (Score:2)
You can do site specific searches right from google by using the 'site' option. So to search wiki for 'lenin' you would enter the following on google:
lenin site:wikipedia.org
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Wikia Search also includes buttons allowing users to try their search on the other major search engines with a single click ...
You can do site specific searches right from google by using the 'site' option. So to search wiki for 'lenin' you would enter the following on google:
lenin site:wikipedia.org
That's two different things altogether. Wiki Search supposedly lets you use other search engines from the same page. The Google example you gave lets you confine the same Google search results to hits from one site.
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That's not what that sentence says. What wikia has are buttons that try your search on other search engines. It's like Google having a button "try this search on Altavista". Not a great functionality on established search engines, but on a system like this, that needs to find it's place, it's a pretty good idea.
The main reason they're doing this, I imagine, is that they want to be people's home page, so it's a good idea to offer the same functionality as their previous homepage (eg. Google).
Will use for one purpose (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I'm bitter, I can't count the number of wasted clicks on their search results from google. Now that google cache doesn't work with experts-exchange, it is nothing but a time waster.
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Gods, my kingdom for a google blacklist
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http://img261.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotof8.png [imageshack.us]
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is wikipedia really trustworthy anyway? (Score:1)
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There's no such thing a perfectly trustworthy information. Ever, anywhere.
The following goes for all information: If you care about being able to trust it, you verify with another source. The more you care, the more you verify.
Wikipedia has a hard limit to its trustability, and within that limit they are doing very, very well.
So in answer to your question: he use of information that no-one can trust is as a starting point. It's the use of any single source of information.
Okay, then why the name? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know, I know, they do wiki-stuff and so on. But I can't help thinking that if anyone else besides Jimmy Wales had come up with that name, he would have a counterfeiting lawsuit at his neck right now.
I'm not sure it's such a good idea either. Forever, it will be "The-firm-that's-not-affiliated-with-wikipedia". I can already see the crowds of wikeeks (wiki-geeks. clever, I know)
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There are other wikis with "wiki" in the name, and other companies with "wiki" in the name. There have been since before Wikipedia, and there have been new ones since Wikipedia.
The particular confusion with Wikia primarily arises from having the same spokesperson. :)
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Battle-Merchants (Score:1)
Wikia is mostly fancruft (Score:1, Flamebait)
Despite Wales' hype about Wikia becoming comparable to Google, Wikia is mostly a hosting service for fancruft. The biggest wikis are Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], the Marvel Comics database, and similar dreck. Wikia's demographic lives in their parents basement.
This is not a basis for a useful search engine.
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