Wikia Search Unhappiness

Wikia Search, the project to bring the Wikipedia-magic of unpaid labor, I mean, web collaboration, to search engines, has not been heard from recently. A digital-sharecropper of the electronic plantation, err, community member, is restless:

*Whats happening with the project. AFAIK overall (and i know somethings have happened) but *very* little seems to have happened since the launch. ... Many things have been promised by various people, which havent happened. Most specifically this has come from a certain member of staff, one specifically, that has said that they will do many things, but even the most basic of tasks seem to have not happened. so Broken/missed promises. ...

The project lead replies:

I feel and share your frustration, I know at least for my part I've done a poor job keeping going a steady stream of updates on the things I've been playing with. Of course, I've never personally been good at regularity, tend to step back and push things out in spurts... all I can do though is try to catch up for the last month or so of various chaotic activities. ...

Another reply

First let me say that if anything has been missed, or promised and then not delivered, it was not intentional. Second, I would agree with you that while we have been working to make changes to improve the accuracy of the search results, we have not been doing a very good job of keeping the community informed about those or other changes and that is something we need to work on. ...

Notably to my mind, I hadn't realized that the internal ranking algorithm was so primitive, not even having what's known in public about Google's technology (the launch was atrocious, but that could have just been time pressure). I guess no search experts want to work for free, for the dubious "fun" of making Wales rich.

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Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)