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]
- Wow, usually when someone says that the other party "took things out of context", I assume that they meant that the discussion before and after the quoted section would lead to a different interpretation. I didn't think that Wales literally cherry-picked sentences out of a long discussion to make both sides of the discussion look radically different than what they were. I really don't understand why Wales and the WMF have been so ridiculous about this whole thing- they had an obvious problem, came up with an ambitious solution, it turns out that they couldn't really do it, and... they now feel the need to lie and cast aspersions and throw people under buses for it. Guys, if you want to be a big-shot "tech company in the field of education/charity", then you need to take tech company 101: not every neat idea you have works out, and the takeaway is to learn from it, not fire everyone who disagreed. --PresN 01:35, 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]
- These are Wikimedia Movement resources and the WMF is simply a steward of the resources. It is disclosure in normal English of our strategy / goals that I am currently requesting rather than full scale consultation. Also typically those most involved in a conversation are also some of the most informed , I agree w/DocJames on this 100%....in my view we are not painted on the wall (we edit for hours work , logic dictates we should have a voice). While the general idea by Jimbo Wales is great, its a matter of "whether the end justify the means"? (lack of transparency)..NO.--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:44, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Of course. WMF prepares 35 million dollars for a "knowledge engine" but can't spare a couple thousand for digitizing public domain materials in "the global south" or "developing communities" or whatever their term is now. Priorities, priorities... and the people who speak out get shafted. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 15:51, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Chris, more to the point, one might weigh up some of the spending on physical meetups, trinkets, and carbon-intensive travel and accommodation, against clearly high-impact tasks such as digitizing. Just my 2 cents' worth. Tony (talk) 15:58, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Since everyone has (rightfully) praised Andreas for this penetrating article, I'd like to ask a possibly stupid question: what would this proposed search engine offer a user that isn't already available? Besides the usual search function, there are hyperlinks between articles, similar articles are grouped into categories, & similar materials on different projects (viz. Commons or Wikisource besides Wikipedia, or even other-language Wikipedias) have links in the article. And when Wikidata matures sufficiently, that will provide a means to search for material between projects. And while improvements to the search function could be made, it will help a user to mine Wikipedia for all related information. So if I want to know what the Wikimedia projects have about Tom Cruise or Queen Elizabeth II, it's not that hard to find it all at present. Far easier than the library card catalog (or Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature) I had to rely on as a student decades ago. So what would a search engine offer that a user doesn't currently have -- or is likely to have in the not so distant future? -- llywrch (talk) 17:09, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- The idea that simply duplicating the ability to answer a simple question like "How old is Cruise?" on Wikipedia's home page will pull readers off of Google's home page to ours (seems we do want to compete with them for "home-page market share")... the idea seems silly. How many readers are so helpless that they can't search for Cruise himself, and easily find his age in the infobox. The only reason to leave Google's engine is for a specialized search that it can't handle. We recently had a discussion about Semantic Mediawiki, which tries to answer more sophisticated questions. From that you'll see that we have a long way to go to catch up to the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine. It might be less expensive to just buy that. wbm1058 (talk) 23:43, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- +1 The future would be an IPA (e.g. Siri, Cortana), not Wolfram, and some are even free software. --Molarus (talk) 01:02, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Platypus (backed by Wikidata) can answer it, FWIW. --Ori Livneh (talk) 03:57, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Which just shows that spending resources developing a search engine is wasted effort. If the future is something similar to the proposed semantic web, Wikidata is a strong first step towards that -- & already supports a few proof of concept examples. Further, IIRC those examples were developed without Foundation backing. All that having the WMF create another search engine accomplishes is to add another line to someone's resume. (And by saying "someone" I'm not trying to say Lila Tretikov in a cute way; as more information comes out, the more obvious it is that there are other people who are likely to be the real person behind the Knowledge Engine. Treitikov might have been only a scapegoat.) -- llywrch (talk) 16:08, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- The {{Orphan}} template features a nifty "find link" tool that is very helpful for creating links to orphan articles. This is part of the work of crowdsourcing for relevance. Doesn't Google's algorithm give priority to pages with a lot of incoming links pointing to them? So whatever "knowledge engine" we build will be more powerful if it has a stronger web of interwiki links to build off of. Just a little thing like a bot that ran Edward Betts' tool against our entire database of orphans and pointed out the most linkable ones would be helpful. Maybe I'll ask for it in the next round of the community wishlist survey, but that seems like a waste of time when the bulk of resources are directed elsewhere. wbm1058 (talk) 00:53, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Another excellent piece by Andreas Kolbe, the best writer in the field of Wikipedia-focused journalism. So we see again that Jimmy Wales has some honesty problems. How soon is he leaving the Board? Chris Troutman (talk) 17:47, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Gotta pile on and agree that Andreas rocks. Nice to see Signpost hitting its stride again and putting April Fools' Fortnight behind us (but for another ArbCom melodrama). wbm1058 (talk) 01:25, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Agree, excellent piece of work. I hope we can make progress getting some answers. SarahSV (talk) 02:13, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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