Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-02-10/Special report



The 13-page grant agreement between the WMF and the Knight Foundation was released on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on February 11, following the Signpost's inquiry to the Knight Foundation the day before.

The Knight Foundation grant has been a contentious topic in the Wikimedia community, and ousted WMF Board of Trustees member James Heilman has alleged that his initial opposition to the grant, which he ultimately voted in favor of, was a factor in his dismissal.

Numerous questions remain about the grant, which was intended to kickstart a project formerly called the Knowledge Engine – now referred to as Wikimedia Discovery. Chief among them is the question Andreas Kolbe asked last week in the Signpost, "So, what’s a knowledge engine anyway?".

Key players have repeatedly stated what the Knowledge Engine/Discovery is not – namely, a search engine intended to compete with Google. For example:

However, these statements are flatly contradicted by the now-released grant agreement between the WMF and the Knight Foundation. Quotes such as the following make it abundantly clear that what is envisioned under the terms of the grant is indeed a search engine:

Three internal WMF documents illustrating how WMF thinking about the project evolved have been leaked to the Signpost:
 * An "April 2 – FINAL – Knight Search Presentation – 04.02.15"
 * A "June 24 Attachment 1 of 2 – Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia"
 * An "August 2015 – WMF Submission to Knight"

While Heilman did not provide these documents to the Signpost, he confirmed their authenticity and stated that these were the same documents that were released to the entire Board following pressure from him and fellow Board member Dariusz Jemielniak, in the face of reluctance from other Board members and Tretikov. He told the Signpost that after "other board members told us we did not need to see" them "we pushed hard to have these documents released to the Board."

We describe the documents in detail in this week's "In Focus". The earliest document, dated April 2, 2015, is a 12-slide presentation marked "FINAL". While the phrase "Knowledge Engine" does not appear, it's clear that even at this early stage, the "Wikipedia Search" referred to here was a well-developed concept. The presentation contrasts the ideals and motivations of commercial search engines – they "highlight paid results, track users' internet habits, sell information to marketing firms" – with those of "Wikipedia Search", which will be private, transparent, and globally representative. It repeatedly stresses that "No other search engines carry these ideals".

Several well-designed examples of search results follow, including the one pictured above. They prominently brand Wikipedia and feature multimedia content and multiple Wikimedia projects such as Wiktionary and Wikivoyage. The results include non-wiki sources like Fox News and Open Maps.

The June 24 document is a draft proposal for the project, by then referred to as the Knowledge Engine, which promises to be "a new global project that will once again change the way people access knowledge on the Internet", fully leveraging Wikipedia's and the WMF's resources, values, and reputation. The Knowledge Engine is described as "a federated knowledge engine that will give users the most reliable and most trustworthy public information channel on the web" that "will make the Internet’s most relevant information more accessible and openly curated, and it will create an open data engine that’s completely free of commercial interests". Knowledge Engine "will be the Internet’s first transparent search engine, and the first one that carries the reputation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation."

The proposal divides the plan into four stages, each lasting 16–18 months. Interestingly, the first stage is called Discovery, which is the term the WMF currently uses to refer to the Knowledge Engine project. The proposal asks for US$6M from the Knight Foundation over three years. It pledges $2.4M of the WMF's own resources to the project for the current fiscal year, including eight presumably full-time engineers and two data analysts.

The final document, dated August 5, 2015, resembles the publicly released current grant agreement in many ways, including much of the same language. The grant amount has dropped to its current $250,000, but this amount is only for the first Discovery phase of the larger Knowledge Engine project. Both the amount and its designation for phase one appear in the current grant agreement.

These documents raise significant questions about how much the Knowledge Engine has actually evolved from April 2015 and what the technical and social implications of this project will be for Wikimedia.

These questions are at the heart of the current debate regarding transparency, accountability, the relationship between the WMF and the Wikimedia community, and the uncertain direction of that movement.