The "Knowledge Engine" project

[HRIP7]

Wikimedia-l has some new announcements on the Search & Discovery "Knowledge Engine" project, funded by a Knight Foundation grant.

The term "Knowledge Engine" is now deprecated, "as it caused confusion", but that was what it was originally called.

[thekohser]

Wikimedia-l has some new announcements on the Search & Discovery "Knowledge Engine" project, funded by a Knight Foundation grant.

The term "Knowledge Engine" is now deprecated, "as it caused confusion", but that was what it was originally called.

Is this the thread you wanted to post that in?

[HRIP7]

The fact is that the Knight Foundation announced (archive) its $250,000 grant for "Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia" months ago. The grant period was given as running from 1 September 2015 to 31 August 2016, the grant's purpose being

to advance new models for finding information by supporting stage one development of the Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia, a system for discovering reliable and trustworthy public information on the Internet.

There was nothing on the WMF blog in September.

The question is why this grant is only being announced now, as though it's something that just happened.

[Zoloft]

*scratches head*
*Moves posts to own new topic*

[eagle]

The WMF Staff Directory linkhttps://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/St ... ontractors[/link] lists 14 people in the "Discovery" department. Are these people being funded by this grant?

They include our good friend Oliver Keyes.

I read through the press release with care and would appreciate someone explaining the exact scope of this project. If Google is doing something similar with knowledge graph that allows users to get the information they need without visiting a Wikipedia page, how would such a product come into use? Are we talking about displaying an infobox on a mobile phone without bothering to display the actual (presumably well-written) article?

[HRIP7]

The WMF Staff Directory linkhttps://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/St ... ontractors[/link] lists 14 people in the "Discovery" department. Are these people being funded by this grant?

They include our good friend Oliver Keyes.

I read through the press release with care and would appreciate someone explaining the exact scope of this project. If Google is doing something similar with knowledge graph that allows users to get the information they need without visiting a Wikipedia page, how would such a product come into use? Are we talking about displaying an infobox on a mobile phone without bothering to display the actual (presumably well-written) article?

It's all a bit of a mystery. The MediaWiki page for Discovery lists sixteen people:

Group: Engineering
Team: Teams:
UX team
Moiz Syed, Julien Girault, Jan Drewniak

Engineering team
Yuri Astrakhan, Erik Bernhardson, David Causse, Trey Jones, Stas Malyshev, Max Semenik

Product Management and Analysis team
Dan Garry, Oliver Keyes, Mikhail Popov, Deb Tankersley

Team members from other departments
Kevin Smith (Agile Coach from Team Practices Group)
Giuseppe Lavagetto (Liaison from Technical Operations)
Management: Tomasz Finc

Risker said last year,

Search and Discovery, a new team, seems to be extraordinarily well-staffed with a disproportionate number of engineers at the same time as other areas seem to be wanting for them. I don't see "fix search" in the Call to Action document; even if it fell into the heading "Improve technology and execution", this seems like an abnormally large concentration of the top WMF Engineering minds to be focusing on a topic that didn't even rate its own mention in the CtA. More explanation of why Search and Discovery has suddenly become such a major focus is required to assess whether this is appropriate resourcing.

Discussion on the Transparency gap page:

In January 2016, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. It appears to be a restricted grant (as opposed to a grant funding general operations); and it's unclear exactly what the grant will fund.
In general, it is an important principle that the terms of restricted grants should be clearly disclosed. I just published a more detailed blog post on this topic, outlining the WMF's apparent evolution away from Open Philanthropy in its grant-seeking activities. We should have a clear statement of principles around grant transparency, and the WMF's practices should be upgraded. -Pete F (talk) 02:24, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Another useful link is this one which words what we are building as "To advance new models for finding information by supporting stage one development of the Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia, a system for discovering reliable and trustworthy public information on the Internet." Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:20, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

This says,
DATE AWARDED 09/01/15
AMOUNT $250,000
GRANT PERIOD 09/01/15 to 08/31/16
Why is this grant only being announced now, almost half a year after it was given? Andreas JN466 11:16, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Note the reference to "stage one". I'm not sure anyone has been told what exactly the other stages are supposed to entail. Equally puzzling is that $250,000 is absolute peanuts for the WMF. They take that in one December afternoon.

[Anthonyhcole]

So, Search and Discovery team was formed in April 2015 (linkhttp://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/23/se ... wikipedia/[/link]) and extraordinarily well-staffed by 30 May 2015. The grant was awarded 1 September 2015 and announced 6 January 2016.

This FAQ says it is "an exploratory grant to research and evaluate ways to measure and improve search results on Wikimedia projects". $250,000 will pay for some good researchers. As Sue Gardner said in her 2014 blog post, there's nothing wrong with taking a tied grant if it's for something you were going to do anyway.

I agree with Pete Forsyth in his blog. They really need to publish the restrictions attached to this grant.

[HRIP7]

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/w ... l[quote]On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 2:44 PM, Denny Vrandecic <dvrandecic at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

>
> -- James was not removed from the Board because he was demanding more
> transparency.
> -- James was not removed from the Board because of a difference in opinion
> about the strategy of the Foundation.



Denny, you say James was not removed from the board because he demanded
more transparency, or because of a difference in opinion on strategy.

However, there are glaring issues of transparency around the Knowledge
Engine project, which does signal a major strategic shift. Nobody in the
community has to my knowledge seen the grant application, the grant
agreement; nor do we know how and when this effort really started, who
initiated it, what the envisaged end point is, and who all the stakeholders
are that will profit from it.

All we can do is speculate – and I can think of third parties to whom data
on user interactions with open content would be commercially very useful.

As mentioned previously, as long ago as last May someone like Risker, who
looks at WMF spending, was perplexed just why so many resources were being
devoted to Search and Discovery – resources whose deployment seems to cost
far more than the published grant by the Knight Foundation will pay for:
$250,000 is nothing compared to the costs of Search & Discovery, and a
pittance compared to the $30+ million the WMF has just taken last month.

WMF spending on this means that resources are not available for other
things, like measures to improve content quality, software improvements the
community has asked for, and so forth. There has been no debate about this
with the community.

The first Knight Foundation announcement of funding for the Knowledge
Engine[1] predates the official grant announcement by more than four
months.

This is absolutely baffling to me. And it falls well within the period of
when the board's troubles with James appear to have started.

The Knowledge Engine is an issue James has repeatedly raised on-wiki over
the past few hours and days, on both Wikipedia and Meta, and I dare say but
for the events of the past couple of weeks we would still not be talking
about this even now.

What is and has been going on with the Knowledge Engine project, and why
has there been so little transparency about it?

[1] http://www.knightfoundation.org/grants/201551260/[/quote]One possible factor is that the Knowledge Engine appears to catalogue user behaviour around free content. Understanding user preferences around free content might be very important to those who are earning revenue from displaying such content to their users.

Fun fact: Google and the Knight Foundation are partners in Newsgeist, an Unconference operating under the Chatham House Rule (T-H-L).

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

Newsgeist is by invitation only. Google and Knight invite about 160 people each year including journalists, media company executives and entrepreneurs, academics and a few students. We pick people we have met at industry events, people we work with and people who have been recommended to us for their innovative approaches. We try not to have more than a third of returnees from previous years to mix it up and hear from new people. This careful curation of attendees is the key to a successful unconference.

It was formerly called Newsfoo; Sue Gardner attended in 2013.

[Vigilant]

ARISE!

KnowledgeBase

Totally not the utterly discredited 'knowledge engine' type of thingy.

Knowledge Base is a digital memory and a semantic search engine. In Knowledge Base you can save items from wikidata and dbpedia to your profile and you can do semantic searches like 'list of middle eastern instruments'. It also provides a gui for adding properties to entities. The aim of making Knowledge Base part of Wikimedia is to enrich semantic web and present new ways for utilizing Wikipedia.

Hmmmm....

One of the arrows used to kill the purple unicorn is recycled.
I'm sure it'll work out better this time.