Monday, January 07, 2008

Wiki Citizens Taking on a New Area: Searching - New York Times

It'll be fascinating to see how this plays out

Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.

Like other search engines and sites that rely on the so-called “wisdom of crowds,” the Wikia search engine is likely to be susceptible to people who try to game the system, by, for example, seeking to advance the ranking of their own site. Mr. Wales said Wikia would attempt to “block them, ban them, delete their stuff,” just as other wiki projects do.

Wiki Citizens Taking on a New Area: Searching - New York Times

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