Wikimedia top woman resigns after search engine plans leaked

Wikimedia Foundation executive director Lila Tretikov has resigned after criticizing plans to build a Wikimedia Knowledge Engine. Many Wikipedia editors and staff of the foundation found such a search engine unnecessary.

Tretikov announced her resignation from her position in a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of directors, according to Motherboard. She honored her request and March 31 is her last day at the foundation. The council is now looking for a temporary replacement.

The reason for her departure has not been disclosed, but the council says it will try to “instill confidence in the community and Wikimedia employees”. That trust was dented by the leaking of plans to build a Knowledge Engine, a ‘transparent search engine’. Wikimedia is the foundation that oversees volunteer-filled knowledge projects such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks and Wiktionary.

Many Wikipedia editors and foundation staff did not see the need for such a search engine, which would cost $2.5 million to develop, and was rumored to be built primarily to drive traffic to the Wikipedia pages. The volunteers were particularly upset that plans for such a large project were not officially announced, but only came into the public eye after being leaked.

The Wikimedia Foundation was forced to explain in a statement that it was not a crawler-based search engine and that its purpose was to solicit feedback from the community. At that time, many volunteers had already started initiatives to persuade Tretikov to resign from her position.