WMF strategy consultant brings background in crisis reputation management; Team behind popular WMF software put "on pause"
6 February 2017
Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails
24 April 2016
[UPDATED] WMF in limbo as decision on Tretikov nears
24 February 2016
Search and destroy: the Knowledge Engine and the undoing of Lila Tretikov
17 February 2016
New internal documents raise questions about the origins of the Knowledge Engine
10 February 2016
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An in-depth look at the newly revealed documents |
Discuss this story
This is the best-grounded look at the whole Heilman affair since it began, aided of course by the digging you folks at the Signpost have done and by the addition of the actual email chain between Wales and Heilman.
What a tale of technical overreach, fiduciary irresponsibility, behind-the-scenes machinations, treachery and duplicity!
Magnificent wordsmithing by Andreas Kolbe. →StaniStani 00:10, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
My compliments on another excellent piece of work, Andreas. You should really try to get these articles more widely distributed. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 01:28, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry but this is just a bunch of misconceptions. A query dialog engine is not a Google competitor, it is not even close. (Why do I waste time on reading this?;/) Jeblad (talk) 06:21, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Some thoughts
Hi. Sorry if this is a daft question, but this piece is marked as an op-ed. What opinion is being expressed?
Does anyone disagree that our internal search needs improvement? I would think that Andreas and others would be supportive of efforts to have free, open, and independent search functionality. Below other mission-critical services such as providing SQL and XML data dumps, search is pretty important infrastructure, especially as the Wikimedia projects grow.
If we took an input string such as "How old is Tom Cruise?" and broke it up into pieces, I think we could, with some effort, program this and similar queries to return specific data points. We could look at the most relevant Wikidata item (d:Q37079) to extract the "date of birth" field's value ("3 July 1962") and then do a simple date calculation to show that Tom Cruise is currently 53 years old. Or, if we can get the search results to be better, we can pull out and highlight specific data points alongside the search results.
After we solve "How old is [famous person]?"-type queries, we can add support for alternate phrases such as "What age is [famous person]?" Once we solve that, we can move on to programmatically answering other "easy" queries. I don't think what's being described here requires artificial intelligence or IBM's Watson.
You want a concrete opinion? The search results at Special:Search/How old is Tom Cruise? are currently terrible. Tom Cruise bafflingly doesn't appear in the top 100 results. If Tom Cruise did appear in these results, we could look at the search input, see that it uses a known keyword ("age" or "old"), and then extract that information programmatically to serve our reader/researcher more quickly. Who opposes doing this?
Let's talk about how we can improve search and what that will require. Does an organization similar to the Wikimedia Foundation (or the Knight Foundation, for that matter) need to be involved? What value do these organizations provide? I think there's plenty of room for intelligent and thoughtful discussion about priorities and functionality and serving our readers. Can we start now? --MZMcBride (talk) 03:23, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
About Jimmy's behaviour and character
Was the related email, from Jimbo to Doc James of 30 December 2015 ever shared publicly? HolidayInGibraltar (talk) 19:10, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Kudos to Andreas for an incisive and revealing exposé. Is Wales any longer appropriate as a WMF board member and self-appointed WP figurehead? Given the long, damaging record of evasions, obfuscations, manipulations, lies, misdirections, misrepresentations, distortions, and self-serving personal attacks, the answer couldn’t be more obvious. Writegeist (talk) 19:11, 29 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Data sources
"In recent months, [Jimmy] has multiple times referred to the possibility that 'non-WMF resources might be included in a revamped discovery experience' or that 'some important scholarly/academic and open access resources could be crawled and indexed in some useful way relating to Wikipedia entries' while insisting that any suggestions 'that this is some kind of broad Google competitor remain completely and utterly false.'"
Please don't forget Fox News appearing in a sample search result. --NaBUru38 (talk) 16:11, 29 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]