[Gendergap] Commons Searches

[Brandon Harris]

On 10/13/11 5:47 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
> Unfortunately we currently have zero developers working on search (as
> far as I know). There are several more significant search bugs that are
> also not going to be fixed any time soon. Another issue is that our
> search engine is Java while the rest of MediaWiki is PHP. This makes
> sense for performance reasons, but makes the pool of potential
> developers who are able and willing to work on it much smaller. In other
> words, this might get fixed in a few years, but I wouldn't hold my
> breathe. In the meantime, it would be good to follow Sarah's lead and
> proactively curate the content we have so that there is less potential
> for astonishment in our search results.


	Yeah; this is really a curation issue and not a search engine issue.

	Sadly, I'm one of the few people at the Foundation who knows Java or 
could even work on this, but I expect that there would be much wailing 
and gnashing of teeth were I to spend much time on this.

-- 
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation

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