There is a piece by Wes on the website of the Knight Foundation[1] and an additional FAQ on Discovery's "Knowledge Engine" development on MediaWiki.[2]
The Knight Foundation funds many things, and is a past donor to the Wikimedia Foundation--but I'm aware that the Knight Foundation is also Google's partner in "Newsgeist".[3][4]
[1] http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2016/1/6/exploring-how-peop... [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/FAQ [3] http://alldigitocracy.org/what-is-newsgeist/ [4] https://twitter.com/newsgeist
On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 3:17 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Wes Moran wrote:
The Discovery team has begun six months of research and prototyping, with the goal of building better experiences to help people discover knowledge. You can learn more about the team’s work here <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/23/search-and-discovery-on-wikipedia/ .
This blog post doesn't mention the Knight Foundation. So we already find ourselves wondering whether the "Search and Discovery" (SAD) team's goals are its own or that of people at the Knight Foundation.
Our deliverables include:
- User testing and research on current user flows to understand the
search and discovery experience
- Creation and maintenance of a dashboard of core metrics to use in
product development
- Research on search relevancy and the possibility of integrating open
data sources
- Open discussion with the Wikimedia community of volunteer editors
- Creation of sample prototypes to showcase discovery possibilities
The need to improve our search experience has long been recognized across the Wikimedia projects. We need better ways to help everyone discover the most relevant, reliable information on Wikipedia and its sister projects. For example, while people can search within one project (like Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons), they can’t easily search across the different projects.
Yes. My frustration here is that nothing you're proposing will actually address the real problems facing search. Do you think a "dashboard of core metrics" is going to bring about inter-wiki search? If anything, over the next six to eight months, the SAD team will be even more useless than usual as it focuses on fulfilling obligations of a restricted grant.
It would be great to have a search engine that searches all wiki pages on a local wiki. We haven't even reached that point yet. It would be great to have a search engine that is aware of non-text content and can filter media results. We're nowhere near that point yet. But in a few months, maybe your team will have a better understanding of "user flows" and that will help... something. I certainly won't be holding my breath.
MZMcBride
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