wiki Archive

Wikia Search is announcing today the launch of a suite of statistics and tools for research and reporting on the Wikia Search application. The site statistics tool offers information on queries, contributions and their social network. The statistics can be run by the day or month and there are some Ajaxy sliders for more details. And for those of you with a math calculator, standard deviations are provided.

There are also a few site tools launching today:

• Most Queries
• Most Contributions
• Recent Top Queries
• Recent Top Contributions
• Most Wanted – the difference between top queries and top contributions
• Keyword Trends

Most recently we reported on Wikia Search adding Google AdSense advertising to the search results.

Back in January, Wikia launched the Alpha version of Wikia Search. We said it "wasn’t ready". Last month they made some major additions to the engine. Today they are rolling out the next Alpha version of the engine. I’ve embedded a video below that explains the updates. So far the company claims 20,000 users have registered, 25,000 mini-articles created, and 60,000 edits have been processed to-date.

I spoke with CEO Jimmy Wales who explained the updates to the alpha search engine. Wales noted that many of the new features are "wiki-like" and that you can now edit any search result as you see fit. Add, delete or update any link within a search result. You can also annotate, or preview, a URL in the search result. There’s also the ability to highlight a site in the results if you feel it’s worthy.

Here’s the search result for CenterNetworks. Note the logos up in the header and rated pages. One interesting thing to try out — scroll to the bottom of the page, watch how it adds more results on the fly with no pagination. I’ve never seen this before.

Here are all of the new features inside of the Wikia Search which allow anyone to customize the search results:

• The ability to edit any result, title and summary. The edits are then instantly available to everyone
• The ability to add new results for any search query instantly
• The ability to delete and/or hide any result
• Every result item can be rated 1-5 stars, which will slowly influence the ranking position
• The ability to add suggested and/or related searches for any query
• The ability to add public comments to any result item
• The opportunity to see site previews and annotate text, images, links and forms directly into the results
• The ability to try any search on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine with a single click
• The ability to customize the background on the header for a more themed result for any search
• The opportunity to view the change history showing all the social actions for any page

I asked Jimmy Wales about the spam that this engine will see. Why wouldn’t I want to "own" every relevant query? And why wouldn’t my competitors want to also own every relevant query? He suggested that he wasn’t nearly as worried about spam as I am and that the community will monitor what’s going on. He said, "I don’t see spam as a big problem" when I asked why anyone wouldn’t want to edit the records they are affected by.

There is a pretty active community forming around the Wikia Search engine. I am on all of the mailing lists and have watched some interesting discussions and debates pop up over the past few months. If you are building anything search related, you should be monitoring the Wikia Search developer groups as well.

In related news, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis last week also announced the ability to edit pages on the search-engine friendly content source. Mahalo claims that any edits that are made by a user will be reviewed by one of Jason’s Mahaloians. The changes go live immediately and the review will come later on. This is a different than the above updates from Wikia as Wikia isn’t reviewing the changes, they are leaving it to the overall community to monitor.

The real question is whether people will want to edit for-profit sites for free while helping the CEOs generate more revenue that isn’t returned to the user. Will users want to edit Wikia Search/Mahalo the same way they edit Wikipedia? I’ve said for a while now that Jason would open Mahalo up because the more he can get done for free, the more likely Mahalo is to turn a profit. While Jason has claimed that Mahalo will have several thousand full-time paid editors over the next few years, my guess is that more features will open to the public first. Makes sense right — why pay outsiders when Jason/Jimmy’s fans will do it for free?

MindTouch is announcing the latest release of their Deki Wiki (8.05) open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform today. I’ve embedded a short video below that reviews the new features. MindTouch is also announcing that their platform has been selected to power the upcoming re-launch of their Mozilla Developer Community.

The major update to Deki Wiki in this new version is a new "polyglot" feature. MindTouch describes polygot, "will allow Mozilla to host all languages as a single site. Now language can be specified by sections and pages thereby automatically adapting the user interface of Deki Wiki to the appropriate language. Also, users may search across all languages and search results are prioritized by the user’s default language."

The new version also supports OpenSearch along with what the company notes is over 100 additional features. Check out all of the updates on the MindTouch press room.

Wikipedia has announced today that at "Thursday, March 27, at 00:07 UTC" the worldwide article count for all Wikipedias hit 10 million. The 10 millionth article was posted on the Hungarian Wikipedia and is about Nicholas Hilliard, a 16th century English goldsmith and painter. Check out the Hilliard article in Hungarian and in English.

If you are a stats junkie, Wikipedia has an in-depth stats archive for each Wikipedia around the world. English and German are the two most popular languages Wikipedia offers.

Place your bets for the 100 millionth article. Maybe it will be about how we live on Mars.

Today at MIX08, MindTouch has announced support for Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft ADO.NET Data Services (code-named “Astoria”), and new Windows Live services inside their Deki Wiki product. They have also added a mashup generator with a variety of partners including Yahoo and Microsoft.

Using Microsoft’s new Windows Live Messenger library, Deki Wiki now supports instant messaging within the wiki.

MindTouch has also launched Wik.is which is an online hosted version of Deki Wiki. Think of it as wordpress.com hosted version versus wordpress.org downloadable version. The free version comes with 100MB of storage, unlimited users, unlimited pages, unlimited access to the API. They have started with no ads on the free version and there is a pro version for $99/year which offers 10 GB storage and more customization options.

MindTouch last released a variety of new features in January 2008.

Rob Hof at BusinessWeek is reporting that Jotspot will be relaunching tonight as "Google Sites" as part of the Apps Premier Edition offering a free version and a $50/year per user with a SLA. The Google Sites site is available now. Google acquired JotSpot in late 2006 and has basically been idling as of late. Currently the Sites login page is only allowing @jotspot.com email addresses access into the system.

Google describes Google Sites as, "Create a single place to bring together all the information your team needs to share, including docs, videos, photos, calendars and attachments." It looks like these tools are meant for internal team use.

Hof believes this is a hit against Microsoft Sharepoint or IBM’s Lotus Notes. Not really a fair comparison as both of these offerings are much more robust. However, could this be a direct attack at pbWiki which is widely used for team and internal wikis? And for the sharing functions for rich media, is it an attack against the white label social networking providers including KickApps, Ning, Magnify, etc?

Rex Hammock hopes that Google Sites helps people "get" wikis. I hope people never get caught up on lingo – as long as it does what they need it to, who cares what it’s called. Rafe Needleman has some good screenshots and discussion on how Google Sites fits into the overall Google office suite.

Hof notes that company personnel may push the use of Google Sites outside of IT department approval and by the time IT gets involved, it will be too late and they will be forced to use the tool. I disagree with this but today IT has to be more proactive with forward-moving technologies than they ever have been before. The days of an AS/400 sitting in the closet are over. 

A friend showed me this really weird look-in on Wikipedia — could this be the new version of Wikipedia? It’s certainly not listed on the "Skin" page inside of the user preferences but it is live. I sure hope it’s not as it’s pretty ugly (not that the current site isn’t also ugly) and has lost all of the Wikipedia branding. Perhaps it’s a lighter mobile version? This is all I have for now – will continue to investigate. If you have any information, please leave it in the comments.

FYI – this is a REAL screenshot – I made it myself inside of Wikipedia.