Previous: « Massive Change | Next: Jawik Aswad »
Browsing for food? Wikia Search
Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, has a small new project: "to apply the ideas that have been successful in my creation of large scale wiki communities at Wikipedia and Wikia to the problem of search". Right now, when a search engine locates something for you, you have to make your own mind up about its quality or veracity. Imagine a seatch engine that found something for you *and* harnessed the collective intelligence of lots of people to describe and assess that...thing. Then imagine that the... thing... is something you might consider eating. Wouldn't that be handy?
Search engines are now a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and therefore of society in general. When we seek information, or entertainment, or shopping, or friendship, or any of the other things that we do online, we begin with search. But currently, despite being so fundamental, search is opaque, rather than transparent. It is proprietary, rather than freely licensed. It is secretive and mysterious, rather than being the product of an open democratic dialog.
Search is a difficult problem in terms of community design. Even more than in an encyclopedia or other reference work, search is vulnerable to bad people proceeding from bad motives. But even here, the lessons of open societies, the lessons of open web communities, can be brought to bear to successfully resolve this problem.
I view my work as being about the design of online communities, by which I mean, the design of frameworks for social interaction which give rise to healthy places for people to interact with each other in a way that they find productive.
Links
About the author:
Jimmy Wales (USA)
Wikia
http://blog.jimmywales.com/
Posted by alex at January 23, 2007 10:33 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.doorsofperception.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/12
