Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-02-10/In focus



''This week's "special report" discusses three internal documents from the Wikimedia Foundation that shed light on the history of the Knowledge Engine project. Here, we examine each one in depth.''

"April 2 – FINAL – Knight Search Presentation – 04.02.15"
This is a short, 12-slide presentation arguing that commercial search engines "decide and determine" "how people find information" and "what they find", adding that they "highlight paid results, track users (sic) Internet habits, sell information to marketing firms" and are "biased towards profit over communities".

Wikipedia, on the other hand, is characterised as follows:

The presentation concludes with screen mock-ups of what a Wikipedia search engine could look like, highlighting content from Wikivoyage, Openmaps, Fox News, Wikipedia and Wikidata.

"June 24 Attachment 1 of 2 – Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia"
Marked "CONFIDENTIAL – DRAFT", this 11-page document addressed to the Knight Foundation has the headline "Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia: A Proposal from the Wikimedia Foundation".

After briefly describing the history and achievements of the Wikipedia project, the document states:

This is followed by a set of screen mock-ups labeled "Trending", "Multimedia Content", "Smarter Answers" and "Nearby" and an outline of the four stages of the plan:

There follows a timeline graphic and a more detailed description of these four stages, each comprising an introductory paragraph followed by an average of half a dozen bullet points. The document concludes with the table of costs reproduced on page 9 of the Knowledge Engine grant agreement, appended to which is the following:

"August 2015 – WMF Submission to Knight"
The formal grant application, requesting a much reduced $250,000 from the Knight Foundation, summarizes the proposal as follows:

The remainder of this document is largely reproduced on the latter pages of the grant agreement itself.