search talk:Community
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[edit] Aspects of Community Involvement
What level of community involvement should Wikia Search be aiming for? What is "community involvement"? At first glace, there are two aspects of community involvement, ownership and "who performs a task".
For example, the wiki authors write the content (perform the writing task), and own it, too (the copyright). Note that since owning something can be defined as "making the rules that govern it", "owning something" is just another task to be performed.
Let us define "community involvement" for now as "whether a task is performed by Wikia staff or by a community member".
Each item in the following list could be managed by the community, or not (by Wikia instead), or something in between. Of course, this list could be made indefinitely more detailed.
Please add any aspects that you feel are missing. Please express your opinion about how transparent each aspect should be.
- Mini-article Wiki
- articles
- policies
- user support
- Social network (should be decoupled from the wiki by default)
- User support
- Project management
- Operations
In general, for each of the information items listed on the search_talk:Transparency page, there are a number of tasks to be performed. For each task for each item, it should be decided who is responsible:
- own (set rules)
- create
- change (write)
- read (this is where transparency comes in - who is allowed to read info)
- remove
[edit] Ownership
The search engine as it is today consists of several types of component, such as crawler, index (where the search server looks for matches to a user's query), search result presentation, wiki, etc. For some types, there are multiple instances that can fulfill that role. For example, there are multiple indices which can be searched. The search result page allows the user to choose which index is being searched.
Ideally, in the long run, there would be at least one component of each type owned by an independent entity, such as a foundation. That would amount to a truly free search engine, for those who want one. Components might be mixed and matched to achieve different goals than freedom. For example, a user might want to use a different, commercial index, in order to get higher search quality.
Does Wikia plan for such independent ownership? If so, when?
[edit] Relationships with other principles
The principles of Community and Privacy are obviously conflicting, at least partially so. Community requires participation, privacy aims at seclusion.
Some users who jump at Wikia Search do it because it has built-in community support, especially the social network. Some users have even expressly given up on privacy.
Others jump at Wikia Search because they value privacy a lot and want to fly under the big search engines' radar. Some users keep mostly away from the social network.
[edit] Opinions
The social network feature may run away from rather than towards more trustworthy searching. --Rainer 23:39, 30 March 2008 (UTC)