Credit: CSA Images / Getty The founder of Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia, is developing a wiki-based search engine to compete with established commercial search engines from Google and Yahoo.Jimmy Wales announced plans to develop the search engine, to be named “Wikiasari,” or “Wikia,” for short, in a Dec. 23 online posting. The Wikimedia Foundation of St. Petersburg, Fla., which manages the website Wikipedia.com, emphasizes that the search engine project is not associated with the foundation.Wales said that current search-engine technology, using complex algorithms to complete searches, is “broken.” “It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability (and) lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that,” he wrote at the site, search.wikia.com.Wales promotes Wikia as “a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot.” He invited members of the Wiki community to help design the Wikia search engine, which he described as “an open-source alternative for Web search.” He cited open-source search projects such as Nutch and Lucene as related efforts that can help in the development of Wikia.Wikipedia is maintained with donations from users. The foundation filed its first financial statement Nov. 21, listing just over US$1 million in assets for the year that ended June 30.While Wikipedia began mostly as a resource on technology issues, it has expanded to cover more general topics. And although its populist mission is to let users edit content, it has had to correct some embarrassing inaccuracies. Most notably, it let stand for four months in 2005 a posting identifying newspaper publisher John Seigenthaler Sr. as being involved in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960s. It removed the posting only after Seigenthaler objected.Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.— Robert Mullins, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau) Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe