Wikiasari: Wikipedia-like Search
Herd: Wikiasari: Wikipedia-like Wikia-backed Search Project
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine ... that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!
The idea is not Wikipedia itself as a search enginge, but using some of the techniques of getting people to work for free, outsourcing to suckers, err, I meant to say collective intelligence, for a search engine.
Digression: I am amused that Jimbo Wales is going around correcting reports:
The Wikia Search project homepage explains: Amazon has nothing to do with this. :) Help me spread the word?
Value add: Greg Linden: "Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch had a good critique of social search efforts a few months ago."
Myself, I don't take the view that it can't work, but rather that there are some tough problems (e.g. see discussion in Nick Carr's post) that have to be addressed for it to work. I believe Google already does some investigation for feedback of its results, in sampling occasionally what people click-through in results.
I find Wikipedia fascinating in part for the hodgepodge of ways it has managed to solve the problem of getting material (dream-selling, intellectual "extortion", plagiarism, and more), combined with the really elaborate ideological defenses it's evolved to deflect criticism of its flaws. It's all not a combination one would be able to foresee working in advance. People often mystify this, but it's not that the elements are unknown, it's that making a going concern out of them all is very hard.
But I could see some comparable approaches it would be interesting to at least try for a search system, especially if someone else is paying for it all with venture capital money. Heck, if I didn't have such baggage as a sometimes-critic of Wikipedia, and similarly vis-a-vis the Harvard Berkman Center (lesson there: [Seth], no agreement with you needs to be kept), I'd make a proposal to Wales.
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in wikipedia | on December 24, 2006 09:07 AM (Infothought permalink)
i think they will do gr8..
Regards
anil
http://www.errorforum.com
The entire internet will just become the equivalent of Wikipedia's vanity pages and heated discussion about star trek. No, wait, it's already that, but with wiki's zany new search, that's all you'll find when you look for something.
The entire internet will just become the equivalent of Wikipedia's vanity pages and heated discussion about star trek. No, wait, it's already that, but with wiki's zany new search, that's all you'll find when you look for something.
Your "working for free" angle only holds water if hard cash is the only currency being exchanged.
Of course, the world is more complicated than that.
Hugh, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
By "working for free", I mean hard cash here, or at least some firm equity.
Not marketbabble that they're being "paid" in warm and fuzzy feeling, so they are getting "paid" I tell you, they're "paid" as it's redefined for marketing purposes, like "conversation" ...
The venture capitalists at Wikia aren't putting up their money for the joy and happiness of it.
Nobody does anything on the net unless they think there's something in it for them, Seth. The "suckers", as you call them, are as selfish and self-interested as anyone else.
To the victor goes the spoils etc.
Who just wrote "the world is more complicated than that."?
One of the worst things about blog-evangelism is the credo of the confidence-hustler, "You can't cheat an honest man".
It's the exact same pattern, the assertion that the suckers are morally equivalent to the grifters, hence the grifters are justified.
It's not the exact same pattern, because people who contribute to Wikipedia etc know what's in it for them, not does Wikipedia claim one thing and deliver something else.
You just don't like seeing other people succeed, is my guess.
I would say the opposite - the main driver of Wikipedia is claiming intellectual status and then delivering digital-sharecropping.
It's sooo predictable :-(. Whenever a blog-evangelist starts to lose the argument, they reach for the tried and true - PERSONAL ATTACK!
That really should tell people something about what's at work here.
Seth, if it were anyone else, I would say, "You are joking, right?"
;-)
PS. Losing the argument? According to who? Wikipedia continues to grow by the day, And you? Do the math.
Am I going to get straw-manned, about some sort of claim that Z-listers are saints? The point is that the exploitative belief system is very standard and typical - and one of the hallmarks is a means of marginalizing critics. "You don't have the courage to be rich!" "Sour grapes from those who can't see the glorious correctness of The Revolution!" "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!".
If the next reply was going to be that philsophically, no belief system can be proven in an absolute sense - consider it said (this takes into account the trivial "Well, blog-evangelism critics can say bad things about blog-evangelists, so moral equivalence, gotcha!")
Indeed - if popularity was all that mattered, and victory assured, why do you care at all what's said in an obscure comment thread of an unheard critic?
If a tree falls in the forest ...
No. It doesn't ;-)