Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails

Op-ed

Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails

The "gaslighting" email

In recent weeks, onwiki debates on the Knowledge Engine and Heilman's dismissal have largely died down. The most recent substantial discussion took place three weeks ago on Wales' talk page, when Wales set out to explain certain comments he had made in a February 29 email sent to Heilman and Pete Forsyth, shortly after the resignation of executive director Lila Tretikov.

As Signpost readers will recall, Forsyth took the controversial decision to forward Wales' mail to the Wikimedia-l mailing list. Forsyth felt it could provide "important insight into the dynamics surrounding Heilman's dismissal". In the ensuing debate, a number of people pronounced themselves horrified by the tone and content of Wales' email, likening it to "gaslighting" (a form of mental abuse). Others criticised Forsyth for his decision to publish it.

The Facebook discussion

Heilman's Facebook comment had a context. In the discussion (accessible only to logged-in Facebook users), Liam Wyatt said he was unsure that Wales could be characterised "as having been 'kept in the dark'" about the Knowledge Engine project. "James has said that the board as a whole was presented with these plans – that it was described as 'a moonshot' and that they were presented with cost estimates in the tens-of-millions," Wyatt added, pinging Heilman in his post. Heilman then replied minutes later that he had indeed asked Board members in October whether they understood "that we were building a 'search engine' as before Oct I did not realize we were. JW said that he understood this all along and it was something we needed to do."

The post appears to have angered Wales. In his email, he wrote to Heilman:

As an example, and I'm not going to dig up the exact quotes, you said publicly that you wrote to me in October that we were building a Google-competing search engine and that I more or less said that I'm fine with it. Go back and read our exchange. There's just no way to get that from what I said – Indeed, I specifically said that we are NOT building a Google-competing search engine, and explained the much lower and much less complex ambition of improving search and discovery.

Attentive readers will note that the phrase "Google-competing search engine" appears nowhere in Heilman's post.^[1] Heilman was responding to a post that said there was a search engine project that the board was told would cost tens of millions of dollars.

Selective quoting

Jimmy Wales

When Peter Damian challenged Wales to dig up the exact quote, Wales produced it, and to back up his point published excerpts from the October email conversation, with selected quotes from Heilman and himself.

Heilman asserted that Wales' summary of the exchange was "far from complete", and "not an accurate representation of the overall discussion". He asked Wales whether he would have any objection to the complete exchange being posted, so the parts Wales had quoted could be seen in context.

Wales raised no such objection, and the full exchange, as made available to the Signpost by Heilman, is published below. It shows that the accusations Wales levelled at Heilman for his Facebook post were groundless and contrived. In the actual conversation, Wales said to Heilman that –

the ambitious vision of a search engine project as presented to the Knight Foundation, offering "a unique search experience that will go beyond what Google and Bing are already providing their users", corresponds exactly to what was approved by the board;
he is "broadly supportive" of that strategic vision;
the scope of the project goes well beyond a Wikimedia-internal search function;
it includes building a natural-language question answering system akin to Google's Knowledge Graph and answer boxes;
the project is motivated by a desire to compete with Google: "users don't come to us", Wales said, because "Google just tells the answers";
the project is a very major financial investment for the Foundation (Wales later confirmed onwiki that it was in the ballpark of $35 million, spread out over several years).

At the same time, Wales omitted to mention in his summary the concerns put forward by Heilman about the cost and scope of this long-term project, and the WMF's qualifications for undertaking it.

One way to look at this situation is that Wales has essentially been launching vigorous attacks on a strawman – the idea that the Foundation might be intending to build a search engine that does all the things Google does: crawling and indexing everything from books, journals and newspapers to social media sites, online shops and cinema schedules. But his apparent single-mindedness in pursuing this strawman cannot make up for the fact that this is not something Heilman has ever claimed. What Heilman did claim was that the Foundation was planning to build a search engine that would cost tens of millions of dollars. In that, he was undoubtedly correct.

The complete October email exchange

The passages Wales quoted on his talkpage are in green. Salient parts Wales omitted from his summary are in bold red.

James Heilman, Oct. 5
Hey Jimmy
Did you realize that we have been developing a search engine for about a year in an effort to compete with Google? Best
Jimmy Wales, Oct 6
I wouldn't have described it in that way, nor do I think the Foundation would, but yes, I'm aware of work in the area of improving search and discovery across all our properties.
James Heilman, Oct. 6
This document from Aug 5, 2015 states:

"The foundation and its staff have a track record of success and a strong vision of what a search engine can do when it has the right principles, and the right people, firmly behind it."

"Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia will be the Internet's first transparent search engine, and the first one originated by the Wikimedia Foundation."

The Sept 18, 2015 grant agreement states "the Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia, a system for discovery of reliable and trustworthy public information on the Internet" as the purpose.
The June 24th 2015 document show images of a Google like setup. While the June 30th document states "how is WMF going to build a unique search experience that will go beyond what Google and Bing are already providing their users?"
The plan appears to be for this search engine to go at www.wikipedia.org What else would you call what is being described? This is not a search tool for Wikimedia properties. It also appears to include Watson / Google graph type functionality

Jimmy Wales, Oct. 7

Yes, that sounds exactly like what Lila presented to the board for approval, and what was approved by the board.

This statement alone, omitted by Wales in his summary, seems ample justification for what Heilman wrote on Facebook. The exchange continued:

James Heilman, Oct. 10
Okay. I must say I am confused than, because Lila now denies that we are building a "search engine".
Yet from your perspective we were told that we were building the "Internet's first transparent search engine" and we approved that?

Jimmy Wales, Oct. 10
I'm not really sure what is causing your confusion here. Perhaps it is just the term "search engine" which in some contexts may mean "a website that one goes to as a destination in order to find things on the web, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo" and in other contexts can mean "software for searching through a set of documents and resources".
But I'm not really sure what your concern is...
Right now the page at www.wikipedia.org is pretty useless. There's no question it could be improved. Is your concern that if we improve it and it starts to look like a "search engine" in the first definition this could cause us problems?
Are you concerned that in due course we might expand beyond just internal search (across all our properties)?
Right now when I type "Queen Elizabeth II" I am taken to the article about her. I'm not told about any other resources we may have about her.
If I type a search term for which there is no Wikipedia entry, I'm taken to our wikipedia search results page – which is pretty bad.
Here's an example: search for 'how old is tom cruise?'
It returns 10 different articles, none of which are Tom Cruise!
When I search in Google – I'm just told the answer to the question. Google got this answer from us, I'm quite sure.
So, yes, this would include Google graph type of functionality. Why is that alarming to you?

James Heilman, Oct. 10
Yes so I think an open source knowledge engine like IBM's Watson and an open source search engine are cool ideas but:
1) These things cost many hundreds of millions to build
2) We have no specific expertise in building them
3) This shift in strategy was done with little / no community consultation
4) What we as a board were told differs from what we are telling potential funders
So I do not believe we can accomplish what we are promising. And a massive effort on this will leave other more important projects uncompleted.
Additionally I believe the lack of transparency around its development is places the WMF/community relationship at serious risk.

Jimmy Wales, Oct. 10
Ok – this sounds like a set of issues you should raise with the board.
Here is how I would personally answer these questions, but I'm just another board member, albeit broadly supportive of Lila's strategic vision.
First, it is true that one might spend hundreds of millions or billions on something like this, but it is not true that there can be no positive results for a reasonable amount of spending. I believe we can materially improve the search/discovery process amongst all our properties for a price that we can afford – and I believe that early work (financed by this grant) should be focused on scoping out an achievable set of things that can be done for various levels of spending – $10 million is well within what we can afford to do.
Second, we have no specific expertise in building them – that's not much of an objection, as we can hire people who do.
Third, I am always in favor of more community consultation. But I've been fighting very hard for a long time against the absurd notion that the community should vote on software. Voters in the community will not all be well-informed and a populist campaign can easily come to the wrong answer on technical matters. So this consultation needs to happen in a much more hands-on way – and it isn't cheap to do.
So, I agree that this is a serious question. For me, it's more of a question of what kind of consultation should happen and when. A commitment to explore a concept through an external grant doesn't strike me as the right point necessarily to engage in a full-scale consultation.
Fourth, I don't agree that there's a serious gulf between what we have been told and what funders are being told.
And then for your 'additionally' – I think this is a serious point , as with your 3rd point.

James Heilman, Oct. 10
Yes and I will be raising these concerns soon. Want to hear Lila's comments on Thursday first. In reply to some of your comments:
1) With respect to improving search, we have already done this per "zero results rate cut in half, from approximately 25% to approximately 12.5%." [1] Stating that zero results are at 33% as of 4 days ago is not correct. If improving internal search was *all* that is planned / promised there would not be an issue and we would be nearly done.
3) 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 (half of our medical editors are health care providers for example).
With respect to software the community should definitely not have it forced upon them. In fact software development should be directed in large part by the users. Us not doing this has resulted in some of our largest problems and is currently why the relationship between the WMF / community is what it is.

Jimmy Wales, Oct. 11
Oh, I don't agree at all. "zero results rate" is a pretty rock bottom metric. Our (internal) search engine is awful, is contrary to user experience everywhere else on the web, and fails to take advantage of changing user expectations of what computers can do.
Imagine if we could return results from Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons / Wiktionary / Wikibooks / Wikivoyage in a beautiful presentation.
Imagine if we could handle a wide range of questions that are easy enough to do by using wikidata / data embedded in templates / textual analysis.
"How old is Tom Cruise?"
"Is Tom Cruise married?"
"How many children does Tom Cruise have?"
The reason this is relevant is that we are falling behind what users expect. 5 years ago, questions like that simple returned Wikipedia as the first result at Google. Now, Google just tells the answer and the users don't come to us.
--Jimbo

"Our entire fundraising future is at stake"

A comment Wales made in November 2015 in a three-way email discussion between Wales, Heilman and a WMF staffer sheds further light on his thinking. Wales responded as follows to the assertion that there clearly had been an attempt to fund a massive project to build a search engine that was then "scoped down to a $250k exploration for a fully developed plan":

In my opinion: There was and there is and there will be. I strongly support the effort, and I'm writing up a public blog post on that topic today. Our entire fundraising future is at stake.

No such blog post was ever published by Wales, to the Signpost's knowledge. But the Knowledge Engine grant agreement – originally withheld by the board, ostensibly because of "donor privacy" issues, and only released after the Signpost confirmed with the Knight Foundation that there were no privacy issues on the donor's side – is more suggestive of the notion that there was indeed a plan, one on which the Wikimedia Foundation's "entire fundraising future" hinged, according to Wales.

This is hard to reconcile with what Wales told the community in February:

There is no overarching master plan. There is a $250,000 grant to begin to explore ideas, with a very limited set of deliverables for phase one.

Discovery presentation with references to "federated open data sources", including non-Wikimedia sources, and public curation of relevance

The deliverables for phase one are indeed very limited, and uncontroversial. But the subsequent stages, sketched out in some detail in the grant agreement and alluded to in the few planning documents that the Wikimedia Foundation has voluntarily made public, remain ambitious. Wales' strategy throughout the fracas has been to insist that no one (apart from Damon Sicore perhaps) had ever entertained the idea of building a full-featured competitor to Google. In the process he has consistently downplayed the actual significance and long-term vision of the multi-stage Knowledge Engine project.

We see that when Heilman said in the above email conversation that this was "not a search tool for Wikimedia properties", Wales readily agreed, stressing the importance of answer engine functions in attracting users that today find their answers on Google. But to the community, Wales has been keen to convey the opposite impression, narrowly focusing on the project's first phase only:

Wales specifically objected to the portrayal of the Knowledge Engine as something that would compete with Google. But in the exchange above, he himself twice emphasises that Wikipedia is failing to offer users the answers that Google is providing to them:

When I search in Google – I'm just told the answer to the question. Google got this answer from us, I'm quite sure. So, yes, this would include Google graph type of functionality. ...
Google just tells the answer and the users don't come to us.

Tom Cruise. Jimmy Wales pointed out to James Heilman that Wikipedia.org isn't able to answer natural-language questions about him like "How old is Tom Cruise?" or "How many children does Tom Cruise have?". Because Google provides answers to such question, Wales added, "users don't come to us".

Referring to the Knowledge Engine grant agreement, Wales says, "I don't agree that there's a serious gulf between what we have been told and what funders are being told." Yet what funders were told was that "Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia will be the Internet's first transparent search engine, and the first one originated by the Wikimedia Foundation ... a system for discovery of reliable and trustworthy public information on the Internet ... a unique search experience that will go beyond what Google and Bing are already providing their users".

In the above email exchange, Wales also alludes to the possibility that "in due course", the Knowledge Engine project "might expand beyond just internal search (across all our properties)". In recent months, he has multiple times referred to the possibility that "non-WMF resources might be included in a revamped discovery experience" or that "some important scholarly/academic and open access resources could be crawled and indexed in some useful way relating to Wikipedia entries" while insisting that any suggestions "that this is some kind of broad Google competitor remain completely and utterly false."

In the "gaslighting" email, Wales also objects to the fact that Heilman included Wikia Search in a timeline published in the February 3 Signpost issue. But a key element of Wikia Search was "public curation of relevance" – volunteers determining how high up in Wikia's search results Internet pages should be ranked (a process that at times led to hilarious results). And public curation of relevance is also a key element of the latter stages of the Knowledge Engine project, as outlined to the Knight Foundation and described in the official project documentation.

To be sure, the Knowledge Engine is not conceived as a full-fledged Google competitor, complete with shopping results, opening hours of shops and restaurants, cinema times, search results from Twitter and Facebook, and so forth (and Heilman never claimed it was).

But judging from the documentation available, it was – or is – conceived at the very least as a niche competitor to Google, crawling and indexing both Wikimedia properties and selected other Internet content and replicating Google's answer engine and Knowledge Graph functionality. When Jimmy Wales says that the Wikimedia Foundation's entire fundraising future depends on the idea, the hope surely is to draw a significant number of eyeballs to Wikipedia.org by providing answers to natural-language questions, following the lead of other AI assistants, and providing search result listings that take users to relevant pages anywhere in the Wikimedia universe, complemented by a broad range of open access and/or academic sources.

It is an ambitious idea, but not in any way objectionable in itself. What is clear however is that building such a search engine will cost tens of millions of dollars. Heilman's concern was that

this was a major decision about the Wikimedia Foundation's long-term strategic direction that the community should be involved in,
this was something that should be openly disclosed rather than kept secret,
the financial investment required to undertake this ambitious project would lead to other projects being underfunded,
if the project should fail to gain traction with users, this could result in tens of millions of donor dollars being wasted.

These were not idle concerns. And the fact that Heilman expressed them in no way justifies the repeated vilifications he has had to endure.

^ The complete post read: "Yes I asked individuals on the board in Oct if they understand that we were building a "search engine" as before Oct I did not realize we were. JW said that he understood this all along and it was something we needed to do.."

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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. --Pres N 01:35, 25 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Nice work, Andreas. Carrite (talk) 01:50, 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]

Excellent work, Andreas. It is clear that ambitions went far too high. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:04, 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]

Well, Jimbo allowed the Signpost bot delivery and some users' comments posted after it to be archived off his talk page with no reply, which is his usual way of "responding" to things he doesn't want to respond to, so I think you can interpret that as his "answer". Note that he has edited his talk page since then. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 17:51, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent article. I hope the WF doesn't spend tens of millions on a better search engine. --Frmorrison (talk) 15:09, 6 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Some thoughts

Hi. Sorry if this is a daft question, but this piece is marked as an op-ed. What opinion is being expressed?

Does anyone disagree that our internal search needs improvement? I would think that Andreas and others would be supportive of efforts to have free, open, and independent search functionality. Below other mission-critical services such as providing SQL and XML data dumps, search is pretty important infrastructure, especially as the Wikimedia projects grow.

If we took an input string such as "How old is Tom Cruise?" and broke it up into pieces, I think we could, with some effort, program this and similar queries to return specific data points. We could look at the most relevant Wikidata item (d:Q37079) to extract the "date of birth" field's value ("3 July 1962") and then do a simple date calculation to show that Tom Cruise is currently 53 years old. Or, if we can get the search results to be better, we can pull out and highlight specific data points alongside the search results.

After we solve "How old is [famous person]?"-type queries, we can add support for alternate phrases such as "What age is [famous person]?" Once we solve that, we can move on to programmatically answering other "easy" queries. I don't think what's being described here requires artificial intelligence or IBM's Watson.

You want a concrete opinion? The search results at Special:Search/How old is Tom Cruise? are currently terrible. Tom Cruise bafflingly doesn't appear in the top 100 results. If Tom Cruise did appear in these results, we could look at the search input, see that it uses a known keyword ("age" or "old"), and then extract that information programmatically to serve our reader/researcher more quickly. Who opposes doing this?

Let's talk about how we can improve search and what that will require. Does an organization similar to the Wikimedia Foundation (or the Knight Foundation, for that matter) need to be involved? What value do these organizations provide? I think there's plenty of room for intelligent and thoughtful discussion about priorities and functionality and serving our readers. Can we start now? --MZMcBride (talk) 03:23, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I think that many people are aware of imperfections in our current search functionality. But I don't think that it is a good idea to try to build a searchengine that uses natural language processing to get answers from a semantic wiki. That seems far too ambitious to me. And let's face it, they are not Google, they simply do not have the people and skill required. To reach such a goal you need to split it up in smaller, more manageable tasks, and I think it starts with improving or even rewriting the current search functionality.

Wikipedians don't really need a search engine that tells them how old Tom Cruise is, because we got a template for that (in this case {{birth date and age|1962|7|3}} which renders as: July 3, 1962 (age 53)). Internet users in general may need such a search engine, but creating it is difficult and making it popular is even more difficult, and I believe that big companies like Google and Apple (and even Microsoft) who have been doing research into (and experiments with) this kind of stuff for a long time now are far more likely to create something that actually works. The WMF is not a software company, and I don't think they can compete with the big guys in this field (Google, Siri), so I think they should focus on their niche.

Personally I wish they would be far less ambitious. I do want them to improve the search engine, maybe even to rewrite it from scratch if they believe that that is the best solution, but please keep offering roughly the same functionality as before, with some improvements and additions, instead of trying to create something superambitious that is gonna be a waste of time and money in the long run. There are many smaller improvements possible, for example the MediaWiki software does offer the ability to search for links only in a specific namespace, but this functionality is disabled on WikiMedia projects, due to efficiency issues.

Imagine if they would successfully create a search engine that gives correct answers to questions in plain English. Imagine if people (who are currently using Google for this type of task) would switch to using this new search engine, built on open standards with open data. Then Google will immediately embrace, extend and extinguish it. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 15:33, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi The Quixotic Potato. The Wikimedia Foundation sure hires a lot of tech folks (cf. wmf:Staff and contractors) if it's not a software company. What kind of organization do you think the Wikimedia Foundation is? :-)

As noted at MediaWiki#Searches and queries, the search back-end was basically rewritten/replaced in 2014. And there have been substantial improvements to the site search functionality since then. But we need to do better; I think we're all agreed on that.

Regarding the threat that Wikimedia projects face from Google, I wrote about that here: mailarchive:wikimedia-l/2016-April/083722.html. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:51, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

MZMcBride, I agree, the op-ed designation seems odd; this strikes me as simply good reporting that, in some areas and transparently, draws conclusions that could be construed as opinions. In most publications, this is simply referred to as "news reporting." But the Wikipedia world can be highly sensitive around the issue of neutrality, and this particular topic is highly sensitive. My guess is that's why it was presented as an op-ed. That designation signals that others might be welcome to submit competing interpretations. In that sense, I like the choice; Jayen466 (Andreas) is a Signpost editor, so it's good to be extra cautious about any impression that his own views and the editorial position or policies of the publication are getting blurred.

On the substance of the piece: Yes, I think everyone can agree that there is room for substantial improvement in Wikipedia/Wikimedia search. I think that has been broadly agreed by many people over the recent months. But I don't see that as a central question in this piece. A very important, unanswered question remains: was the board justified in dismissing a recently-(s)elected Trustee? Or was Docjames actually the only Trustee trying to do the right thing, in the face of a board apparently deeply tied to going about things in a bad way (standing by its Executive Director despite massive staff opposition and attrition, and neglecting to clearly communicate its ambitions to important stakeholder groups like volunteers and staff)?

That question is an important one, and this piece advances the effort to unravel it. -Pete (talk) 15:38, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don´t think we need a question/answering-software, rather an assistant that could do some tasks for editors and readers. We could start with writing into the searchbox something like: WD, show me the article about Tom Cruise, or WD, read out aloud the introduction of that article, or WD, tell me who wrote most of this article, or WD, show me all media files commons has about Tom Cruise. --Molarus (talk) 23:48, 26 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The question is moot. We are here to write an encyclopedia with no end goal and no deadline. Meanwhile, the Board foolishly panicked because the pageviews are down thanks to Google's knowledge graph. While the Board wants to lie to us in pursuit of the next hot thing, I'm happy as a clam to write articles that no one will ever read. We, the editors, are fundamentally different than the Board and incidents like this make plain the depravity of the folks in San Francisco. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:32, 7 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There is a category on Commons for media files related to Tom Cruise. And the searchbox already works, if you type in Tom Cruise you will go to his article. Reading aloud is not something a computer can do; try using a screenreader for a day (I did, because I was curious how blind people experience the internet). Trust me, it sucks. Asking who wrote most of an article is incredibly difficult to calculate, and the answer is useless. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 15:32, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You think it's useless? I think it would be useful to know whether an article was mostly written by, say, a PR firm or publicist being paid by the subject of an article. I don't dispute that accomplishing this might be difficult. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 17:51, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Lots of things can be useful. Only some of them are practical. What you propose is not the latter. 173.79.20.33 (talk) 22:48, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

We could start with writing into the searchbox something like: WD, show me the article about Tom Cruise. Ah, yes, eight words to get to the Tom Cruise article rather than two. How incredibly useful. 173.79.20.33 (talk) 22:48, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, it's possible to cherry-pick a silly example. Can you think of a reason that our search functionality should not support examples such as "show me all media files about Tom Cruise" or "What is Tom Cruise's age?"?

A friend showed me <https://askplatyp.us/?lang=en&q=How+old+is+Tom+Cruise%3F>. This gives the correct answer (53) using Wikidata and other Wikimedia sources as its back-end, as I understand it. Pretty neat! It fails for queries such as <https://askplatyp.us/?lang=en&q=How+old+is+Tom+Cruise%3F> and <https://askplatyp.us/?lang=en&q=What+age+is+Tom+Cruise%3F>, but queries such as <https://askplatyp.us/?lang=en&q=What+is+Tom+Cruise%27s+age%3F> work. This tool is fun to play around with. Like Wolfram Alpha, it's easy to confuse or break it, but we could incorporate this type of functionality into our internal search engine immediately. No making perfect the enemy of the good, especially if we can keep false positives low with more conservative logic (err on the side of being quiet). --MZMcBride (talk) 00:42, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The point is that I have written "We could start". After we have installed an open source software that is able to do that, we could append our own code for more useful tasks. This is a low cost solution with quick results. The board was right that we have to adapt new technology, but it is not Google that we should try to follow. Part of the problem that the board is deciding such things behind closed doors is that they lack the experience of Wikipedia editors and WMF software engineers. --Molarus (talk) 17:50, 29 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

About Jimmy's behaviour and character

The big issue for me here is Jimmy's lying and defaming. It is clear now that James's Facebook comment exactly, accurately reflects Jimmy's statements to James about the Knowledge engine but in his gaslighting email Jimmy accuses James of misrepresenting his (Jimmy's) position. We have a serial liar strutting about posing as our spokesperson, squatting on a board seat, defaming a hard-working popularly-elected volunteer.

Another thing: A new board member discovers there's been a plan to develop an internet search engine that could cost tens of millions of dollars, and takes it to the other board members. And Jimmy's response is evasive and ambiguous. When James points up the contradiction between
"we are not building a search engine"
and the Knight grant documentation's,
"Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia will be the Internet's first transparent search engine ... the Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia, a system for discovery of reliable and trustworthy public information on the Internet"
Jimmy says,
"I'm not really sure what is causing your confusion here. Perhaps it is just the term 'search engine' which in some contexts may mean 'a website that one goes to as a destination in order to find things on the web, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo' and in other contexts can mean 'software for searching through a set of documents and resources'. But I'm not really sure what your concern is..."
Here is where the gaslighting begins in my opinion: It's bloody obvious what James's concern is. And Jimmy is acting as if there's nothing remarkable or potentially concerning going on and that "we are not building a search engine" can be reconciled with the Knight grant documentation.

And another: It's clear now that the WMF was waiting for the right moment to let the community in on this scheme. Jimmy:
"For me, it's more of a question of what kind of consultation should happen and when. A commitment to explore a concept through an external grant doesn't strike me as the right point necessarily to engage in a full-scale consultation."
So, James's concern that this was being kept from the community was well-founded. Jimmy didn't trust the community with this information. James did. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 01:22, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Anthonyhcole and Pete. What do you make of the fact that the vote on the resolution removing James Heilman was 8–2 (really 8–1)? --MZMcBride (talk) 01:18, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know what's behind that. But the trustees on that board seem to be in the habit of voting along with the rest of the board, to get along, to present an image of decisiveness, or something (a practice that seems juvenile and deceptive to me). Jimmy claims that he went into the meeting that sacked James with the intention of voting with the majority. James's proposing the motion to accept the Knight grant despite his misgivings may be an instance of that. That might explain the numbers. Or perhaps James deserved it for some (still) as yet unexplained reason. My point above isn't that James is a useful board member (though having worked beside him on the WikiProject Med Foundation board for years I can attest to his integrity and honour there), it's that Jimmy isn't. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 03:14, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi MZMcBride. All hail the master of all master sockmasters. Starved for attention, much? Do us a favor and stay away when the grown-ups are talking. You have nothing of value to add here. Draco^E 12:25, 29 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi DracoEssentialis. I think Special:Contributions/DracoEssentialis speaks for itself. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 19:25, 1 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

MZMcBride, I don't think it's particularly significant. It's easy for any group to get swept up in the moment for any number of reasons -- legitimate or illegitimate. If I didn't know anything else, my starting assumption would be that they reached near-consensus through a deliberation that was careful and thorough commensurate with the gravity of what they were doing. But in fact, we now know a whole lot of other stuff, which tells a pretty clear story of a group that was layering one bad decision on top of another, rushing this one due to external factors, neglecting to seek independent advice or mediation, underestimating the gravity of removing a board member, etc. etc. So no, I don't think the vote number is especially useful information in the face of all the other stuff we know several months in. -Pete (talk) 05:07, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Was the related email, from Jimbo to Doc James of 30 December 2015 ever shared publicly? HolidayInGibraltar (talk) 19:10, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No. --Andreas JN 466 20:28, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jimmy selectively quoted from the email exchange on his talk, in a way that made James look like the unreasonable party. James was more than within his rights to make the context public. --SB_Johnny | ^talk✌ 00:42, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Kudos to Andreas for an incisive and revealing exposé. Is Wales any longer appropriate as a WMF board member and self-appointed WP figurehead? Given the long, damaging record of evasions, obfuscations, manipulations, lies, misdirections, misrepresentations, distortions, and self-serving personal attacks, the answer couldn’t be more obvious. Writegeist (talk) 19:11, 29 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Same. I had doubts for some time, but this makes it very clear. Peter Damian (talk) 06:07, 30 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Data sources

"In recent months, [Jimmy] has multiple times referred to the possibility that 'non-WMF resources might be included in a revamped discovery experience' or that 'some important scholarly/academic and open access resources could be crawled and indexed in some useful way relating to Wikipedia entries' while insisting that any suggestions 'that this is some kind of broad Google competitor remain completely and utterly false.'"

Please don't forget Fox News appearing in a sample search result. --NaBUru38 (talk) 16:11, 29 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Nice article Andreas TUXLIE 10:37, 20 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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