Tom O'Hara,
I foresee several problems with your proposal.
a) The Wikimedia Foundation itself spent a very large amount of money building something essentially the same which was rejected by the community and abandoned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Foundation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Foundation)
b) Your proposal is for a proprietary software to be added to the core Mediawiki software of Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is notorious for never using third-party proprietary software.
c) The design is still in the stone age when compared to Bing/Google, so would not necessarily compete well to attract the target demographic.
d) The search bar at https://www.wikipedia.org/ already has images in a kind of drop-down search suggestions function, this is nice, but has not become very popular.
I would actually suggest you go down the route of offering it as an extension on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions
Warm Regards
Jeremy Lee-Jenkins
On Fri, Jul 6, 2018 at 3:07 PM, Tomás O'Hara tomasohara@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, here's a link to a proposal I have for adding visual search to Wikipedia:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Use_visual_search_frontend_for_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Use_visual_search_frontend_for_Wikipedia# Proposed_by
(This was created with user ID: tomasohara https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Tomasohara.) I can move it into a better location if desired as it as not a "sister project" proper. The Proposals for new projects https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects page doesn't offer suggestions for alternative postings, so I left it there for now.
Below is a copy of the project overview. See the link above for details on how this can be applied to foreign language wikipedias. Note that most can be supported right "out of the box" except for the text categorization used to select images for documents without images. A Wikipedia-specific way to do this might be possible (e.g., based on the hierarchy of pages).
Best, Tom
It would be good for Wikipedia to use a general-purpose visual search front end. Note that a big incentive for this is that users will be drawn to Wikipedia to use this type of search rather than Google Search or Bing. This would be beneficial because these search engines often show Wikipedia content for popular entities like sports stars or tourist attractions, which cuts down on Wikipedia traffic.
You will be able to use the visual search frontend I developed without charge for the duration of my patent in the works (a la license free). Here is a link to an example with Wikipedia search on left and my Scrappy Search on right:
http://www.scrappycito.com/wikipedia-vs-scrappy-search-small -dog-breeds-en-wiki-site.png
Two other examples illustrate some added benefits of this visual search with respect to Wikipedia. First, disambiguation becomes based on images and keywords rather than just snippets of text. See the following:
http://www.scrappycito.com/wikipedia-vs-scrappy-search-bob-j ones-en-wiki-site.png
In addition, links to other pages for the same entity become much more engaging:
http://www.scrappycito.com/wikipedia-vs-scrappy-search-taylo r-swift-en-wiki-site.png
See http://www.scrappycito.com for the stable version of the system and http://www.tomasohara.trade:9330 for the work-in-progress version. The latter has support for handheld devices and also better aesthetics (n.b., version used in examples).
I think this will be extremely popular with the Instagram crowd and younger users in general (e.g., younger than 30). To do similar Wikipedia-specific searches with the visual search front end, just add *site:en.wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org* to the query*,* as in following example:
Lionel Messi site:en.wikipedia.org
Scrappy Search uses the Google search API, so all of the search operators https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en are supported.
The patent for this visual search will be owned by my company ScrappyCito, LLC. If the company gets acquired, I will require that they honor the license-free usage of the visual search system by Wikimedia for Wikipedia. (They will likewise be required to pass along this license-free usage requirement if they in turn are acquired). You will have access to the current source code for use in Wikipedia and other approved projects.
I am doing this both for exposure and because I want to help keep Wikipedia viable (e.g., by enabling higher traffic). This is a great way for users to browse the encyclopedia, so it can keep users on the Wikipedia domain longer.
If this sounds interesting, I can develop a prototype for the Simple English Wikipedia for use on one of my servers. After review, I help with the deployment for the regular English Wikipedia on your servers once approved.
============================================================== Tom O'Hara, founder ScrappyCito, LLC. PO Box 6430 tomasohara@gmail.com Austin, TX 78762-6430 737-203-1577 www.scrappycito.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe