On 28 Jul 2016, at 17:17, Jimmy Wales jimmywales@ymail.com wrote:
On 7/28/16 9:04 AM, Andy Mabbett wrote:
I've made the former a disambiguation page (not a redirect) linking to:
- The [[History of Wells Fargo]]
- The [[Wells Fargo History Museum]]
You could have done that, too!
:-) Sure, but the point is that there will always be cases like this unless we invest in improving search more generally.
I'd have approached this search question by looking for the 'Wells Fargo' article and looking for the history section in that article - and finding a specific article on the history of the company would be a bonus.
So partly, this is reflecting the fact that if you just search for 'Wells Fargo' on most search engines, you will be taken to a homepage for the organisation that doesn't cover the history, so you need to add 'history' on the end of the search query in order to be given a link to a history page on the corporate website. Whereas Wikipedia provides at least a summary of the history in the article about the organisation, making it easier to find - you end up on the page that contains the info you're after without having to add the extra key word.
Our search engine can definitely be significantly improved - in this case, either to find the specific article, or to point towards the history section of the main article. But search can endlessly be improved (as demonstrated by how much work Google's put into its search engine over the last decade). Plus we also have to work against some of the habits that have been ingrained in users by the way that other parts of the web work, where things can be a bit easier to find on Wikipedia than users might expect.
Thanks, Mike