On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 7:24 PM, Chris Sherlock chris.sherlock79@gmail.com wrote:
I'm just going to quote directly from the Grant application here [1]:
Knowledge Engine By Wikipedia will democratize the discovery of media,
news and information—it will make the Internet's most relevant information more accessible and openly curated, and it will create an open data engine that's completely free of commercial interests. Our new site will be the Internet’s first transparent search engine, and the first one that carries the reputation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.
So to reiterate the words that make it hard for the WMF to deny that they were pitching for an Internet search engine:
I guess I was focused on the grant deliverables, and not the "flavor text" around it. You are correct that the pitch is in the direction of some kind of internet search engine, although it does not specifically say that it would include non-free information sources.
You can tell me the scope was intended to be only for Wikimedia projects, but that isn't what is said in that grant application. That document as it stands literally states that it is to be an Internet search engine. No, I correct myself. It says it is to be THE Internet's search engine.
Clearly there are still aspirations to include non-Wikimedia projects in the search results. I can't speak for the board, or c-levels. But I can say that in my work with the Discovery team, we have not been asked to, and have not had even rough plans to, search non-free information sources.
So when you say than there is confusion between the internal presentation and the official external grant application, I must respectfully disagree with you. There is no such confusion. The two parts of the application I have quoted cover almost a third of the grant application and I'd argue are the key parts of the application.
I would argue that the deliverables are THE key part of the application, but I freely admit that you are correct that the other parts matter. And are somewhat disturbing.
There has been some handwaving going on from a variety of different parties
that "oh, it's just a Grant application, these things are very high level and vague, it doesn't really matter what we write in it lets just put the broadest possible objectives and vision for this thing and we'll deal the scope later on after we've been given the grant money".
Others may not think this is not a concern. I do though, and I'm very concerned that we are making grant applications and not really disclosing our full intentions, and we are not making it clear what are the corresponding scope limitations. Before someone objects, it's even worse when I have asked about the first challenge that could threaten the project and the response [3] is, in part:
Most of us on the Discovery team share your concerns about how this grant was conceived, pitched, received, and (not) publicized. Most of the team didn't see the grant until you did.
So basically, 6 months means that by midway through this month, we will see all of these deliverables. Could someone please advise us how this is proceeding? I’d imagine that we should at least be able to see the dashboard by now, but I’m curious to find out more about the research that’s been conducted and the results of the user testing performed.
I'm hardly the expert here, but the dashboards have been up for a while[1], and are continually being expanded and improved. The user tests have been documented[2]. Upcoming tests are documented in phabricator.
[1] http://searchdata.wmflabs.org/ [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Discovery/Testing
Kevin