Wikimedia Discovery/FAQ

= What is the Knowledge Engine? =

"Knowledge Engine" was an early term used to describe a number of initiatives that related to search and discovery of content. It was/is not a product and instead was meant to easily reference what the Discovery team was focusing on. We've since stopped using the term as it caused confusion.

= Are you building a new search engine? =

No. We are improving the existing Elastic Search infrastructure with better relevance, multi language, multi projects search and incorporating new data sources for our projects.

= But if your adding new data sources isn't that a search engine? =

Our first new data source is OSM data for Maps which our wikivoyage community is already starting to experiment with. There are other data sets that we could potentially surface (census, national gallery, etc) but that will be up to our communities to decide. Some of these could certainly show up in search results and we have phabricator tasks around improving GeoData content T112026

= Does that mean we are looking to shift search traffic away from third parties? =

No. We love all the third party traffic that we get and hope that it increases over time. What we are trying to focus on is providing a search experience that doesn't look like this


 * 1) Search on Google, Bing, etc
 * 2) Follow Wikipedia Link
 * 3) Read
 * 4) Leave and search Google again because you are specifically looking for a Wikipedia article but couldn't find it using Elastic Search

= What does year 0 include ? =
 * 2015-16 Goals

= What does year 1 include ? =
 * Identify pathways for the community to improve relevance via WikiData
 * Actively highlight difficult to find knowledge and empower the ability to surface it in search, reading and editing flows
 * Research open sources of knowledge to continually strengthen the legitimacy of our content through curation by humans and machines