Thank you, Sarah for an excellent question. Sometimes I compare Wikimedia
with an iceberg, only a small portion is visible.
When we started investigating this problem we found out that nearly 30% of
searches on Wikipedia return no results at all. That motivated us to dig
deeper.
Since then we've made our first improvements (by about 1 million searches
a day) , but we have a very long way to go...especially searching across
sites. Commons for example is a very tough one that we will need to help
one day.
I encourage you to read through, I tried to explain our thinking the best
I could, but I can always use help :)
Lila
sent from mobile. please excuse typos.
On Jan 29, 2016 3:50 PM, "SarahSV" <sarahsv.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Lila, thank you for posting this. I have no technical
background, so I only
have a limited understanding of how the Discovery project works. But as an
editor and reader I've been frustrated by the limitations of Wikipedia
search. Even things that I know are there, because I added them myself, are
regularly not returned. Sometimes for reasons I can't fathom; sometimes
because I've mistyped something.
It's the same with Siri on iPhone. I ask it something that I know is on
Wikipedia and it can't seem to find it. Or it will return a link to
articles in which certain terms appear. But people don't want to have to
look at whole articles.
We have this enormous and wonderful amount of knowledge to some extent
trapped inside Wikipedia. How do we unlock it? How do we teach computers
how to find and deliver it? In future, could Wikipedia reply to questions
on people's phones, instead of Siri?
This kind of research sounds very exciting, and the Foundation is
well-placed to do it.
Sarah
On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 4:27 PM, Lila Tretikov <lila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Anthony,
I know this request was for the Board, but I took time to explain as much
as I could about the context of this grant and the work it funds as well
as
to answer as many questions as possible that I
have seen. I realize many
people a curious about what it actually funds, so you will find the
statement of work cut and pasted there.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LilaTretikov_(WMF)#Knowledge_Engi…
<
https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fmeta.wikimedia.org%2Fwiki%2FUser…
Hope this answers some of your questions,
Lila
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