JoeBeaudoinDOTnet

To much fan fare from the Wikipedians and Wikia, the for-profit service, launched their vaunted human-editable and maintainable search engine a few days ago. Essentially, the philosophy behind it is the same as it is with Wikipedia in that you can create and edit what search engines spew out whenever you search for a term.

Of course, having just tried it, I am wholly unimpressed. Then again, this is the same group of people who are involved in MediaWiki development who can’t give us an internal search engine worth a damn… I have to use Google to look up terms on Wikipedia! Bah!

I know that it is a beta, but there are several concerns which ring the alert klaxons immediately.

The more immediate one for me is this: I don’t trust Jimbo’s Jabronis to tell me what I need to know. Just look at the watchdog group Wikipedia-Watch.org and what they’ve dredged up over the years about so-called power-tripping Wikipedians in high powered positions. Frankly, I find the most ardent Wikipedians to be blood-shot eyed liberal extermists who believe in raping and pillaging information to suit their worldview. It really is like the concepts laid out by The Party in 1984 are coming true! “Neutral Point of View” my ass. It is more a case of “Might makes Right Point of View”.

Now, I must note that the ardent, outspoken bloodshot eyed liberal extremists who comprise Wikipedia and some of Wikia are a small minority of their contributor base. However, they are in positions of power, and thus explains my “might makes right” comment. (Axiom of the day, courtesy of Shakespeare: “There is little choice in a barrel of rotten apples.”)

Secondly, there is a reason why search engine algorithms are hidden from the public. If they were released under GNU or other open software license, spammers and the like would easily be able to manipulate search engine results to produce more garbage. Wikia, which says that it’s search engine code will be revealed to all, will be exploited ruthlessly by spammers and scammers wanting to make a buck because they know how it works. It’s like telling a thief who wants to steal from Fort Knox everything about the security setup!

To summarize, it’s really simple why Wikia’s Search will fail, and it all boils down to these tried and true axioms:

1. Money talks, bullshit walks.
2. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
3. History is written by the victors.

I’ll leave you with this tidbit from 1984:

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

This is the future. Fight it ’til we can’t.