Wikia Goes Editable – Do You Trust It?
We looked at people-powered editable search engine Wikia back in January when it was in alpha. At the time they were still in alpha, with poor results but plans to let users refine things by contributing articles to result pages. Now they’ve relaunched, as a search engine crossed with a full-fledged wiki. What does this mean? If you search for a term, say “web work,” and you’re not happy with the results, you can change them. Specifically, you can add or delete sites, mark particular results as spotlighted, or use a rating system to move them up or down the page.
Wikia is hoping that the same sort of community self-policing that’s been the backbone of Wikipedia will keep people from making a mockery of its results pages. So far, although the early activity is running at close to 1 update per second, the spammers don’t seem to have discovered this yet; pages for “valium” or porn terms haven’t been seeded with new results. But it’s probably only a matter of time before that happens, opening up the question: do you trust your peers to help pick the most relevant search results, even with the monetary incentive of driving traffic to particular sites?
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It’s virtually impossible to effectively do that on wikipedia – the editors will catch up on you quickly, so I guess the same can be true of wikia search. If they manage to pull in the same quality editors (which is very likely in my opinion) – they could swallow mahalo just like wikipedia slammed other online encyclopedias.
I think that is possible. There is the need of a community and of a system that help the community to do the job in an easier and faster way.
I don’t trust it yet, but once a couple of thousand people have searched for the same thing…. then I might.
What might be nice is a way to see how many people have rated a site, and when. This would let me tell the difference between the “Best of the Year” written in 2001 & the one written last week, as well as knowing that 100 people think a site is the best for a topic, versus 800,000 thinking somewhere else is best.