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The reason Wikipedia's search is broken isn't (only) because it doesn't take advantage of the interesting data representations you can use; it's also just a rea
by redthrowaway 15y ago
The reason Wikipedia's search is broken isn't (only) because it doesn't take advantage of the interesting data representations you can use; it's also just a really shitty search algo. It doesn't make any guesses, it doesn't look at related terms, and it often won't bring up the relevant article unless you specifically type that article's name.
There's a huge opportunity to beautifully represent information on Wikipedia and make search easy, intuitive, and informative, but it all rests upon having a search algo that isn't utter crap. The WMF will have to fix that before any of this will have any practical benefit.
As an ironic aside, it seems that Wikipedia isn't OSS. I can find the repo for MediaWiki, but Wikipedia seems to be a heavily modified version thereof, and it appears to be proprietary. If anyone can find the repo, I'd appreciate a link.
- DieBuche 15y agoWhat do you mean by heavily modified? Wikipedia is running version 1.17wmf, basically 1.17 with some fixes pulled from trunk. You'll find it here: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/wmf/1.17wmf1/ http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/wmf/1.17w... You'll find the installed extensions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version
- _delirium 15y ago> It doesn't make any guesses, it doesn't look at related terms, and it often won't bring up the relevant article unless you specifically type that article's name. I'm not sure it does the best job, but it does make guesses. For example, if you search for y cobbinator, it asks, Did you mean: y combinator. Though perhaps they should be more aggressive, like Google, and just go ahead and return the corrected results right away if the original query returned 0 results.