Over the weekend you may have heard news that the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that finances and founded Wikipedia, is interested in creating a search engine that appears squarely aimed at competing with Google. What you may not have heard is that this nascent project is tearing the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia community apart.
In September, the Wikimedia Foundation won a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to start building the “Wikimedia Knowledge Engine,” a “system for discovering reliable and trustworthy public information on the internet,” according to grant documents, which were released late last week.
