4 ms·

Why did the community react with such vitriol to the search engine product? I would like a free, open, privacy conscious search engine to exist.

by jitl 11y ago

forgottenpass 11y ago
Relations between those what run wiki and those what own wiki have always been strained. I'd imagine the LYING about the new product idea is a bigger cause of vitriol than the product itself. Wikipedia editors had been asking to see documentation about the Knight Foundation grant for several months, but Wikimedia was not forthcoming with the details. Earlier this month, documents related to the grant were leaked to and published by The Signpost, Wikipedia's online newspaper. In a special report, The Signpost published the 13-page grant agreement and ran an article asserting that the "Knowledge Engine" would be, contrary to statements by Jimmy Wales and other board members, some type of generalized Internet search engine.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  But were they actually LYING about the new product proposal? Or maybe they were just hashing out what they'd like the proposal to be, and how it's articulated, before putting it forth for community review? If you've ever been involve in anything "management-esque" you'll know this is quite a common route to take. It's often better to wait a bit before unveiling a proposal -- until it's gelled, and you have a clear articulation of what it's going to be -- rather than dump some half-baked statement of it on everybody (which would just burn through their time, and have other negative consequences).
  - forgottenpass 11y ago
    If you've ever been involve in anything "management-esque" you'll know this is quite a common route to take. Yeah, but there is a difference between ideas that aren't ready to be broadcast, and betraying the trust someone has placed in me with the understanding there are just some things I have to operate on in secret. And if you've ever been involved in anything "management-esque," you'll know that a mutual acceptance of what barriers exist doesn't preclude being deceitful and dishonest in protecting that knowledge. I won't say the line is perfectly clear, but lets look at the scenario in question. Responding in a hairsplitting manner that serves to mislead someone asking pointed questions about ideas behind the curtain. It occurred at non-profit that values transparency, the ideas were in flux but firm enough to seek grant funding, and there were no externally-imposed legal constraints to stay quiet on it. Well, that seems quite firmly in the "lie of omission" category.
    - kafkaesq 11y ago
      I get your general point. About general principles and such. But please understand that as an outsider, it's difficult to see (from what you've written above) where trust was broken, or what other lines have been crossed. You do seem quite strident in your overall judgement of what happened. But I still don't have a clear picture (or any picture really) as to what did happen. You know, an event chronology, or the like? That might be helpful.
xlayn 11y ago
Those search engines exist, among them -https://search.disconnect.me -Duck Duck Go Look at it this way: they would try to create a competitive advantage, as they are also behind Wikipedia they could better use it, in the process they can create an API to access information in such a way that other search engines cant. A better proposal would be to create a project to start adding semantics to the Wikipedia project, maybe a RFC and standards so all search engines can benefit of it. Another option could be an open sourced project to host blogs making use of the above described tech. Then you could perform a search based on the "intended meaning" instead of the words included and who reference it. Edit: Removed Yandex per comment below after research.
- gkya 11y ago
  Sorry, Yandex?
  - xlayn 11y ago
    I stand corrected, I erronously implied that the fact DDG uses its results implied the same policy about privacy which does not. " 2.3. Data collected by or transmitted to Yandex, the Company or Partners, in the course of accessing, interaction and operation of the Site and provision of the Services may include, without limitation, the following Data: (i) Internet Protocol (IP) address and location; (ii) cookie information; (iii) browser identification information; (iv) information on your software and hardware; (v) date and time of accessing the Site and the Services; (vi) information of third parties websites referred the Site or the Services; (vii) information related to your activity in the course of the Services use, including, without limitation, search queries history, search results provided to you in response to your query, web pages you visited by reference from the search results; (viii) other information." https://yandex.com/legal/privacy/ https://yandex.com/legal/privacy/
- lukeschlather 11y ago
  Neither of those search engines are even remotely equivalent to a free, nonprofit-managed engine that doesn't track users and provides Free source code and documentation to operate a clone of the index.
ttctciyf 11y ago
When this event was posted here a few days ago[1] I spent probably an hour or so reading through the timeline[2] posted in one of the comments. To a non-wikipedian such as myself it's a little opaque, but builds to quite a climax. It probably helps one to understand the depth of the resentment Tretikov engendered amongst some of the staffers. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176955 2: http://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/
Sven7 11y ago
Amen. It's an unfortunate effect of social media and the information overload. People get flooded with info. They spot hypocrisy. They think they are doing gods works by pointing it out. They get encouraged by the likes and retweets. And we get an endless cycle of people who have no idea what to do about hypocrisy upvoting each other. The architecture needs to change. We have hit peak hypocrisy detection. You can detect hypocrisy in anything by spending a few days looking into things just like the "activist" editors have. The kind of people who do things about hypocrisy...well...where's the algo for that?
- iamcurious 11y ago
  I think we are close, but we have yet to reach peak hypocrisy detection. We could have a wiki of hypocrisy, where you can search for a certain person and find out all the times they contradicted themselves, possibly with justifications. (Maybe evidence changed their minds and they stand corrected.) We could have an hypocrisy rating weighted by influence on the matter. For example: Mr. John Smith has contradicted himself x% of the time in matters where he has a strong influence and provided a justification backed by evidence for only y%. On z% of the topics he has contradicted himself, he has offer a threshold of evidence required to change his mind again. He has violated j% of those thresholds. All this gives him an overall coherency rating of k% which puts him in the nth in the ranking of his colleagues. That would be peak hypocrisy.
devit 11y ago
Because they are spending donated money on something with a huge chance of failure and limited upside. Some probably even suspect that it is a vehicle for funneling the donated money to the top management's personal pockets since that's a good explanation for why they would go ahead with something so ill-advised.
- mathattack 11y ago
  And while this may sound far fetched, the lack of transparency hurt the cause of the executives. "If you aren't hiding something, why are you hiding something?"
- stordoff 11y ago
  Even ignoring how the money is used, some of the recent donation drives have been really off-putting. Multiple times I've been scanning an article on my phone to find the section I need, only for the page to grey-out and become non-interact-able because a donation request banner[1] has loaded over the top of the article. It's not a huge deal (scroll to the top, close it, and continue), but annoying your users is a pretty poor way to solicit donations IMO. [1] Similar to https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/FY1415MobileBannerTestExample.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/FY1415Mo...

Why did the community react with such vitriol to the search engine product? I would like a free, open, privacy conscious search engine to exist.

by jitl 11y ago

Why did the community react with such vitriol to the search engine product? I would like a free, open, privacy conscious search engine to exist.

forgottenpass 11y ago

Relations between those what run wiki and those what own wiki have always been strained. I'd imagine the LYING about the new product idea is a bigger cause of vitriol than the product itself. Wikipedia editors had been asking to see documentation about the Knight Foundation grant for several months, but Wikimedia was not forthcoming with the details. Earlier this month, documents related to the grant were leaked to and published by The Signpost, Wikipedia's online newspaper. In a special report, The Signpost published the 13-page grant agreement and ran an article asserting that the "Knowledge Engine" would be, contrary to statements by Jimmy Wales and other board members, some type of generalized Internet search engine.

kafkaesq 11y ago
But were they actually LYING about the new product proposal? Or maybe they were just hashing out what they'd like the proposal to be, and how it's articulated, before putting it forth for community review? If you've ever been involve in anything "management-esque" you'll know this is quite a common route to take. It's often better to wait a bit before unveiling a proposal -- until it's gelled, and you have a clear articulation of what it's going to be -- rather than dump some half-baked statement of it on everybody (which would just burn through their time, and have other negative consequences).
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  If you've ever been involve in anything "management-esque" you'll know this is quite a common route to take. Yeah, but there is a difference between ideas that aren't ready to be broadcast, and betraying the trust someone has placed in me with the understanding there are just some things I have to operate on in secret. And if you've ever been involved in anything "management-esque," you'll know that a mutual acceptance of what barriers exist doesn't preclude being deceitful and dishonest in protecting that knowledge. I won't say the line is perfectly clear, but lets look at the scenario in question. Responding in a hairsplitting manner that serves to mislead someone asking pointed questions about ideas behind the curtain. It occurred at non-profit that values transparency, the ideas were in flux but firm enough to seek grant funding, and there were no externally-imposed legal constraints to stay quiet on it. Well, that seems quite firmly in the "lie of omission" category.
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
    I get your general point. About general principles and such. But please understand that as an outsider, it's difficult to see (from what you've written above) where trust was broken, or what other lines have been crossed. You do seem quite strident in your overall judgement of what happened. But I still don't have a clear picture (or any picture really) as to what did happen. You know, an event chronology, or the like? That might be helpful.

xlayn 11y ago

Those search engines exist, among them -https://search.disconnect.me -Duck Duck Go Look at it this way: they would try to create a competitive advantage, as they are also behind Wikipedia they could better use it, in the process they can create an API to access information in such a way that other search engines cant. A better proposal would be to create a project to start adding semantics to the Wikipedia project, maybe a RFC and standards so all search engines can benefit of it. Another option could be an open sourced project to host blogs making use of the above described tech. Then you could perform a search based on the "intended meaning" instead of the words included and who reference it. Edit: Removed Yandex per comment below after research.

gkya 11y ago
Sorry, Yandex?
- xlayn 11y ago
  I stand corrected, I erronously implied that the fact DDG uses its results implied the same policy about privacy which does not. " 2.3. Data collected by or transmitted to Yandex, the Company or Partners, in the course of accessing, interaction and operation of the Site and provision of the Services may include, without limitation, the following Data: (i) Internet Protocol (IP) address and location; (ii) cookie information; (iii) browser identification information; (iv) information on your software and hardware; (v) date and time of accessing the Site and the Services; (vi) information of third parties websites referred the Site or the Services; (vii) information related to your activity in the course of the Services use, including, without limitation, search queries history, search results provided to you in response to your query, web pages you visited by reference from the search results; (viii) other information." https://yandex.com/legal/privacy/ https://yandex.com/legal/privacy/
lukeschlather 11y ago
Neither of those search engines are even remotely equivalent to a free, nonprofit-managed engine that doesn't track users and provides Free source code and documentation to operate a clone of the index.

ttctciyf 11y ago

When this event was posted here a few days ago[1] I spent probably an hour or so reading through the timeline[2] posted in one of the comments. To a non-wikipedian such as myself it's a little opaque, but builds to quite a climax. It probably helps one to understand the depth of the resentment Tretikov engendered amongst some of the staffers. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176955 2: http://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/

Sven7 11y ago

Amen. It's an unfortunate effect of social media and the information overload. People get flooded with info. They spot hypocrisy. They think they are doing gods works by pointing it out. They get encouraged by the likes and retweets. And we get an endless cycle of people who have no idea what to do about hypocrisy upvoting each other. The architecture needs to change. We have hit peak hypocrisy detection. You can detect hypocrisy in anything by spending a few days looking into things just like the "activist" editors have. The kind of people who do things about hypocrisy...well...where's the algo for that?

iamcurious 11y ago
I think we are close, but we have yet to reach peak hypocrisy detection. We could have a wiki of hypocrisy, where you can search for a certain person and find out all the times they contradicted themselves, possibly with justifications. (Maybe evidence changed their minds and they stand corrected.) We could have an hypocrisy rating weighted by influence on the matter. For example: Mr. John Smith has contradicted himself x% of the time in matters where he has a strong influence and provided a justification backed by evidence for only y%. On z% of the topics he has contradicted himself, he has offer a threshold of evidence required to change his mind again. He has violated j% of those thresholds. All this gives him an overall coherency rating of k% which puts him in the nth in the ranking of his colleagues. That would be peak hypocrisy.

devit 11y ago

Because they are spending donated money on something with a huge chance of failure and limited upside. Some probably even suspect that it is a vehicle for funneling the donated money to the top management's personal pockets since that's a good explanation for why they would go ahead with something so ill-advised.

mathattack 11y ago
And while this may sound far fetched, the lack of transparency hurt the cause of the executives. "If you aren't hiding something, why are you hiding something?"
stordoff 11y ago
Even ignoring how the money is used, some of the recent donation drives have been really off-putting. Multiple times I've been scanning an article on my phone to find the section I need, only for the page to grey-out and become non-interact-able because a donation request banner[1] has loaded over the top of the article. It's not a huge deal (scroll to the top, close it, and continue), but annoying your users is a pretty poor way to solicit donations IMO. [1] Similar to https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/FY1415MobileBannerTestExample.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/FY1415Mo...