[Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing

[Erik Moeller]

2008/12/1 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> People use the search feature on commons?
>
> I would assume they would click the link at the bottom of
>
> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paard_(dier) and get taken to
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Equus_caballus?uselang=nl

This is a valid point, especially when one uses it as a starting point
to think about search. It might be feasible to build a search tool on
the basis of this existing tagging of Wikipedia articles to Commons
media -- and similarly, Wiktionary, Wikinews, and so on. This is an
alternative to the notion of one giant ontology that's used for
tagging. Instead you would treat a wiki -- any wiki -- as the
ontology. So you could do a Wikinews/Commons search for terrorism, a
Wiktionary/Commons search for pronunciations, etc. Because the
approach would be wiki-agnostic, it would also be language-agnostic,
and yield useful results as long as the underlying wiki is large
enough and its articles are well tagged to Commons.

What would be the technical requirements of this approach and what
would be its disadvantages?

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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