Search mechanism on Wikipedia is rather basic. As Wikipedia grows it will
become more and more inefficient and inadeqate.
We are not aware of any plans of making Wikipedia software more robust to
take into account the size of encyclopedic data being gathered ( at an
astonishing speed) and hopefully growing number of Wikipedia end-users.
BTW we have no idea what are even approximate figures on different Wikipedia
page hits. Sigh.
The another point is that Wikipedia is weak at categorizing its data.
Some efforts are made but with arrival of EB articles, they will be definitely
lagging behind.
Why is Google successful and Altavista is not ?
Because Google has an ingenious system of categorizing and ranking Web pages.
I have only vague idea about the software of Wikipedia but perhaps my idea
might be viable.
The mechanism :
<br>
Then suitable software can easily search those pages digest them and present a nice search results. Ha.
What do you think ?
Or maybe a much much better software solution is currently under way at Bomis
?
My 2 cents.
Kpjas
This would also provide a smoother transition, because worst-case we could begin using it prior to the feature actually being in the software, and searches, for instance would then already work for the keywords. First phase would be a SMOP to just stop display at the special keyword. Later phases could begin actually using the information. For example, this wouldn't be too obnoxious if visible at the bottom of a page:
+- - - - - - | (body of article here) |$METADATA (html generation/page display would cease here) |Keyword: blah; blah; blah ... |Title: This is a Pretty Title for This Page |Abstract: A one-line abstract. Well, maybe | two lines. ...
Following the conventions of many RFC-style headers -- "Tag: value" -- starting in column one, and leading whitespace represents continuation. I guess you could use multiple "Keyword:" tags if you wanted to rank them, as suggested above. Also, perhaps use semicolon separators for keywords to allow embedded whitespace and commas. Much more elaboration and you'd probably need database support, and likely have to change wiki software (php or Zope based). --loh (2001-06-20)