OStatic

eWeek reported this morning that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has closed up shop for Wikia, his community-driven search engine. Wikia Search launched in January 2008, and was reported to be the fifth-fastest growing community destination by Nielsen Online in February 2009. The Nielsen statistics seem to have incorporated data from other sites in the Wiki line, however, and reports say that Wikia Search was only drawing 10,000 unique visitors per month.

Wikia Search was a very different animal than traditional search engines, as it substituted search results provided by algorithms for those chosen and ranked by community members. It's certainly an interesting idea -- it's an idea that might actually work exceedingly well under the right circumstances. For now, however, Wales has opted to put work on community-based search on hold and focus his team's efforts elsewhere. He also holds out hope that community search is workable, and vows that when it takes hold, he'll be there in some capacity, actively contributing or simply cheering on the effort.

Last month's Technology Review featured a piece on semantic computing. Semantic technology -- whether it's applied on the web or the desktop -- seems almost impossibly complex, as it tries to bring some very human traits of relating and connecting information to a machine environment. The artificial intelligence field, relatively speaking, is in its infancy, and since the human brain is largely an indistinguishable mix of biology and culture, it would seem semantic technology would be confined to psychology departments and computer science labs.

That isn't the case, of course. And when you consider that semantic technology deals with computers and people, and that any technology or study ultimately benefits from larger participant pools, it's little wonder that the Nepomuk project is open source and now even comes integrated with the KDE desktop.