Talk:Wikimedia Discovery/RFC

Re: Public Curation of Relevance
I think referring to the current relevance algorithm as a "black box through elastic search" is a little disingenuous. The code is all open source, as is the configuration. Here is where we set default weights we give to fields, here's where they're overridden, here's where they're mostly used. We do the same with phrase slopping and a bunch of other config too. Additionally, the concept of relevance is documented upstream and all the code going into it is public. I think we can do a better job of documenting how these different things come together to generate a _score though. Maybe that will help it seem less of a black box :)

I totally agree that we should continue to add ways to allow users to help curate content in search and affect relevance. In fact, Nik and I did some work on this quite some time ago that I think goes mostly forgotten. For Wikinews, we do article age favoritism, as new articles are more interesting on a news site than old ones (and that's what lsearchd did too)--this weighting is configurable. However, I think the biggest (and most unused) feature we already have support for is allowing wikis to configure how they want to boost/lower featured/bad content. I configured it for enwiki some time ago but I highly doubt this super powerful feature has made it to many other wikis. ^demon[omg plz] 18:24, 10 December 2015 (UTC)