Billinghurst,

Thanks for the email. I'd like to address two points in my reply.

Firstly, I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that development of our search systems is going strong. In the reorganisation of the Engineering and Product Development department in April, search definitely gained a bigger focus. Of the thirteen people in the Discovery Department https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Discovery, nine of those spend a significant portion of their time on search; the breakdown by focus being four backend engineers, one frontend engineer (who joined the team three days ago), one designer, one product manager, and two data analysts. It's pretty safe to say there's more resources assigned to search now than there ever has been in the past.

Secondly, I'm a little confused by your assertion that there's been silence. In fact, on this very list, I've made a number of posts to this list over the course of the past few months regarding search. Examples: [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-September/083008.html [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-August/082651.html [3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-August/082692.html [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-June/082012.html. I've not written a post on this list for all of our work, merely the most worth announcing. A big communication obstacle has been that we've been missing a community liaison for a long time, and we're hiring one https://boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/99533?t=1hkepi#.VhG8fflVhBc to rectify that. I've also talked about search at the monthly metrics meeting twice, at Wikimania last year, and in several other talks which are available on the WMF channel on YouTube. Perhaps this was a terminology issue; were you were expecting me to add "CirrusSearch" to all my communications? So, I guess I'll respond to your query with my own query: what do you think we (meaning both the Discovery Department *and* interested users such as yourself) could've done differently so that you did not have this perception that there has been silence? One idea that I have had having posed this question is the availability of a central resource where all such communications like talks, presentations and relevant emails could be collated, so that I could answer queries such as yours with a link to this list. Would that be helpful?

Thanks, Dan

On 3 October 2015 at 21:28, billinghurst billinghurstwiki@gmail.com wrote:

For a while Cirrus Search was the "bee's knees"[1] around here, and we were got to the stage that all wikis were moved onto this search functionality.

Then silence. Complete and utter silence.

Presumably there has been stuff happening out of the public eye, and I am not wanting to dig into personal areas, however, the silence on what was a key development is very disappointing. Can we please have an update. Thanks.

Regards, Billinghurst [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bee%27s_knees _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l