Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-13/Community view

Engine

I don't want to become a part of a knowledge engine. I want to be a member of a community that makes and shares educational resources.

Wikipedia's search engine isn't very good and should be improved. But building a new project to collect information even less structured than Wikidata is far from our needs and wishes.

I agree that the board should have several members from educational backgrounds. Technology is a tool, the strategic goals are educational. --NaBUru38 (talk) 15:41, 17 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Discovery is actually devoting the lion's share of its resources trying to improve the existing search, and that's reflected in Discovery's quarterly goals. An example of our work towards this is the completion suggester beta feature, which we recently rolled out, which improves the search algorithm used for the type-ahead search. We're also trying to improve search for multi-lingual users with language detection. It's an incredibly common misconception that the "knowledge engine" represents some new and significantly different direction which does not involve significantly improving our core search, and that's why we've now stopped using the term. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 19:08, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]