Information Retrieval on Wikipedia: How You Can Help

In response to my various calls to action here at The Noisy Channel, I’ve gotten a fair number of requests from readers asking me for specifics on how they can help. I’d like to offer some concrete suggestions. I’m hoping to make them bite-sized enough that we can make a task queue that volunteers will pick up.

Proposed projects: 

• Add a History section to the Enterprise Search entry. Some suggested sources:
  – “Challenges in Enterprise Search” by David Hawking 
  – “Enterprise Search: Tough Stuff” by Rajat Mukherjee and Jianchang Mao 
  – Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008 
  – The list of Enterprise Search Vendors (but please don’t revert this page back to a vendor list!)
  – Enterprise Track at TREC

• Add a “Definition” section to the Enterprise Search entry that subsumes the current entry and explains the various competing definitions of “enterprise search”. Posts on this blog that mention enterprise search, as well as the material they reference, would be a good starting point. This task might also include eliminating the Enterprise Information Access stub  and pointing it to the Enterprise Search entry.
   
• Create a Faceted Search entry. Amazingly, Wikipedia doesn’t have one, and the Faceted Classification entry is not (and should not be) a substitute. Marti Hearst’s HCIR ’08 paper would be a great starting point.
   
• Go through the Information Retrieval category and propose at least incremental steps to organize the 91 entries in it. For example, should vendors be on this list? Open source software packages? I don’t know what is standard for a Wikipedia category, but it is ironic that the Information Retrieval category is so chaotic!

I also encourage people here to add to this list, though I suggest to those same people to consider contributing more than just work for others. And, to be clear, some of the entries in this category are excellent, e.g., the entry on stemming. We should aspire to raise all of the entries to this level, and at least to promote high-quality entries so that they are not buried by their lower-quality brethren.