Why did the community react with such vitriol to the search engine product? I would like a free, open, privacy conscious search engine to exist.
I'd imagine the LYING about the new product idea is a bigger cause of vitriol than the product itself.
Wikipedia editors had been asking to see documentation about the Knight Foundation grant for several months, but Wikimedia was not forthcoming with the details.
Earlier this month, documents related to the grant were leaked to and published by The Signpost, Wikipedia's online newspaper. In a special report, The Signpost published the 13-page grant agreement and ran an article asserting that the "Knowledge Engine" would be, contrary to statements by Jimmy Wales and other board members, some type of generalized Internet search engine.
Or maybe they were just hashing out what they'd like the proposal to be, and how it's articulated, before putting it forth for community review?
If you've ever been involve in anything "management-esque" you'll know this is quite a common route to take. It's often better to wait a bit before unveiling a proposal -- until it's gelled, and you have a clear articulation of what it's going to be -- rather than dump some half-baked statement of it on everybody (which would just burn through their time, and have other negative consequences).
Yeah, but there is a difference between ideas that aren't ready to be broadcast, and betraying the trust someone has placed in me with the understanding there are just some things I have to operate on in secret. And if you've ever been involved in anything "management-esque," you'll know that a mutual acceptance of what barriers exist doesn't preclude being deceitful and dishonest in protecting that knowledge.
I won't say the line is perfectly clear, but lets look at the scenario in question. Responding in a hairsplitting manner that serves to mislead someone asking pointed questions about ideas behind the curtain. It occurred at non-profit that values transparency, the ideas were in flux but firm enough to seek grant funding, and there were no externally-imposed legal constraints to stay quiet on it. Well, that seems quite firmly in the "lie of omission" category.
But please understand that as an outsider, it's difficult to see (from what you've written above) where trust was broken, or what other lines have been crossed. You do seem quite strident in your overall judgement of what happened. But I still don't have a clear picture (or any picture really) as to what did happen.
You know, an event chronology, or the like? That might be helpful.
It's an unfortunate effect of social media and the information overload. People get flooded with info. They spot hypocrisy. They think they are doing gods works by pointing it out. They get encouraged by the likes and retweets. And we get an endless cycle of people who have no idea what to do about hypocrisy upvoting each other.
The architecture needs to change. We have hit peak hypocrisy detection. You can detect hypocrisy in anything by spending a few days looking into things just like the "activist" editors have. The kind of people who do things about hypocrisy...well...where's the algo for that?
Mr. John Smith has contradicted himself x% of the time in matters where he has a strong influence and provided a justification backed by evidence for only y%. On z% of the topics he has contradicted himself, he has offer a threshold of evidence required to change his mind again. He has violated j% of those thresholds. All this gives him an overall coherency rating of k% which puts him in the nth in the ranking of his colleagues.
That would be peak hypocrisy.
Some probably even suspect that it is a vehicle for funneling the donated money to the top management's personal pockets since that's a good explanation for why they would go ahead with something so ill-advised.
[1] Similar to https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/FY1415Mo...
-https://search.disconnect.me
-Duck Duck Go
A better proposal would be to create a project to start adding semantics to the Wikipedia project, maybe a RFC and standards so all search engines can benefit of it.
Another option could be an open sourced project to host blogs making use of the above described tech.
Then you could perform a search based on the "intended meaning" instead of the words included and who reference it.
Edit: Removed Yandex per comment below after research.
" 2.3. Data collected by or transmitted to Yandex, the Company or Partners, in the course of accessing, interaction and operation of the Site and provision of the Services may include, without limitation, the following Data: (i) Internet Protocol (IP) address and location; (ii) cookie information; (iii) browser identification information; (iv) information on your software and hardware; (v) date and time of accessing the Site and the Services; (vi) information of third parties websites referred the Site or the Services; (vii) information related to your activity in the course of the Services use, including, without limitation, search queries history, search results provided to you in response to your query, web pages you visited by reference from the search results; (viii) other information."
But when you think about it more, they're quite different from what's being proposed for the Knowledge Engine.
To a non-wikipedian such as myself it's a little opaque, but builds to quite a climax. It probably helps one to understand the depth of the resentment Tretikov engendered amongst some of the staffers.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176955
2: http://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/