On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 4:01 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak darekj@alk.edu.pl wrote:
On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 10:55 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Here is what I don't understand: both Dariusz and James have said that
they
pushed hard for transparency and community engagement about the project
at
that time, and expressed concern that there hadn't been any. Do you not remember that? Yet nothing happened.
My recollection is that we were given a plausible explanation that all the big visions and brainstorming never went into production. Yes, there were ideas floating around, but they did not go anywhere.
This is why James motioned to approve the grant, as I understand. I don't think either of us would support the grant if we were unconvinced at the time. We did, however, insist that any work going outside of the simple "improve internal search" scope should be consulted.
Thanks for this, Dariusz.
We should be quite clear here though that the Discovery 0-1-2 presentation,[1] which is still part of the official FAQ,[2] speaks of "federated open data sources". It envisages far more than a purely *internal* search engine.
It envisages a volunteer-curated search engine drawing on a whole host of sources from within and outside of the Wikimedia universe, with output vectors including "Mobile", "API", "Kindle" and "Apps".
This is part of the overall strategy to this day. Consultation would really be appropriate here.
My personal view is also that we need to be careful not to commit any resource in the future by agreeing on some relatively small grants in the present.
If they were in favour, and you were in favour, why didn't it happen? Who resisted?
I don't think that anyone resisted - we basically came to an understanding that the grant was not a big project, and that while there may have been grand(iose) visions about it, they never materialized to the level that would require board or community involvement.
Thanks again, that helps.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Discovery_Year_0-1-2.pdf&am... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/FAQ