On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Fæ <fae...@gmail.com> wrote: > The original vision for Wikia was as a "Google-killer" open search
engine, so it would seem highly prudent for Jimmy to have declared a conflict of interest and avoided WMF board discussions and votes in relation to new development projects around open Knowledge Engines / Search Engines. > Um, what? The vision for Wikia (then called Wikicities) was a wiki hosting provider for small communities. See e.g. [1]. (And also, I suppose, to capture the ad money that could not be captured on Wikipedia, and put it into MediaWiki development. Today the contributions to MediaWiki from Wikia are dwarfed by those from Wikimedia but that wasn't always so.) Search Wikia was a (short-lived and thoroughly unsuccessful) experiment to create a community of search engine developers and come up with an open-source, transparent, community-curated Google-competitor. Which was a nice idea, if unrealistic, and IMO more likely to end up in a new Wikipedia-style thing than anything profitable to Wikia, given that there was no lock-in. I'm not even sure if Wikia the company was involved in it in any significant way, apart from providing the wiki used for discussion and creating some media attention. [1] http://www.sptimes.com/2005/04/04/Technology/Global_villages_conve.shtml _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
