The Discovery department's [1] work to improve search continues with a new tool! We are asking volunteers to help choose, or discern, which search results are the most relevant.
One way of improving search results relevance is to provide search results from multiple search engines side-by-side for comparison. Participants pick the best, most relevant results, which are then used to tune our own search results. It's one way to help improve search with human assistance, by showing articles that are most relevant to search queries. This system is used by many R&D departments and gives great results.
Discernatron is a tool developed by the Discovery department for just this sort of work. Visitors are asked to pick the most relevant results across four different search result sets. The data is then used to help improve our relevancy model for search. Screenshot at [2]
If you are interested in helping, you can access Discernatron at https://discernatron.wmflabs.org/ and authenticate with your unified user account.
To learn more about the tool visit Mediawiki.org. [3]
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discernatron_screenshot.png [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discernatron