Wikindex (2)

Wikindex is a proposal for a multiligual project aimed at creating a free index of websites, with the capability to define statements about their content for categorization. Unlike current search engines, this would enable a user to query websites by type of content instead of relying on different algorithms based on page ranking to find websites on specific themes.

This is a proposal for a new Wikimedia sister project.

Wikindex
Status of the proposal
Status	under discussion
Details of the proposal
Project description	A free index of websites, catalogued by the community and able to be queried by anyone.
Is it a multilingual wiki?	One multilingual project
Potential number of languages	Multiple languages
Proposed URL	www.wikindex.org
Technical requirements
Additional project settings	Wikibase

This website could benefit researchers, journalists and the general audience by providing a transparent and well-organized curated space for finding different websites online. Unlike popular search engines, it could also list dead websites and annotate their content, providing archival links that could aid preservation efforts for content on the internet.

This project would enable users to insert new webpages, create statements that define their type of content and niches, and could enable community curation through the creation of notability guidelines. This would allow users to query for a list of French-speaking astronomy websites or specify the style of website like a list of astronomy forums.

Tecnology and Wikidata

This project would use Wikibase, the software that powers Wikidata. With Wikibase, it would be possible for the user to create SPARQL queries that would return the lists.

While it is may be possible to use Wikidata to accomplish the goals of this proposed project, the scope and notability requirements would differ significantly, leading to the creation of numerous new items, which could be disruptive to the existing project. There are currently more than 1 billion websites and around 110 million items in Wikidata as of the end of 2024.

For that reason, a new project is being proposed with the autonomy to define how strict or comprehensive the scope would be without having to worry about the impact caused to Wikidata as it is today or demanding major changes to its notability rules.

Scope

The scope of this project would depend on a community decision. They could choose to:

• include or exclude themes of websites: e.g. gambling, AI-generated content, social media posts, piracy, etc.
• limit the sections of the webpages that will be indexed: all pages and subpages, only homepages, articles, etc.

Future

This project could also enable the creation or improvement of search engines, by consuming the contents curated by the community.

This could provide useful in an environment with an increasing amount of non-free search engines that:

• obscure web results by implementing unhelpful AI answers
• are constantly gamed by SEO optimizations that may provide unhelpful results that increase ad-revenue for their owners
• strongly benefit advertisers by ranking them better on search results and may insert hidden keywords into search queries, changing the real results

This could enable the creation of systems in that the user could choose the classification of the information or maybe create curation lists for websites, and not only depend on for-profit motivations for finding websites.

Proposed by

Luk3

Alternative names

• Wikidex
• Wikidir (from directory)

Related projects/proposals

• Curlie - A non-wiki project with a similar goal. It should be noted that Curlie classifies websites under a single category, and does not use multiple statements for each website like it is proposed for Wikindex.
• Wikidirectory - An already stalled proposal for an wiki subsitute of DMOZ, an predecessor of Curlie. The proposal was well received by the community. This proposal is different from Wikidirectory for the same reason as Curlie above.
• Wikindex - Even though this proposal has the same name, it has an completely different purpose unrelated to website indexing.

Domain names

www.wikindex.org

Mailing list links

Not mentioned in mailing lists yet.

Demos

No demos currently available yet.

People interested

• Luk3 (talk) 02:36, 18 December 2024 (UTC)