[WikiEN-l] (fwd) WikiLens wants YOU

Fri May 27 10:29:50 UTC 2005

Forwarded for Dan Frankowski, dfrankow at cs.umn.edu.

- d.

Have you ever wanted to toss aside that pesky "neutral point of view"?
Wouldn't it be fun to get *opinionated*?
Would you help with a project similar to Wikipedia, but for opinions?

Wikipedia is a community-maintained encyclopedia based on fact ("Vampire
Watermelon" aside ;) ). WikiLens (http://www.wikilens.org) is a
community-maintained repository of *opinion*. Right now, those opinions
are expressed as ratings, comments, or lists, which are in turn digested
to show people useful information. For example, ratings are turned into
recommendations; lists are mentioned on each item page.

Think of Amazon, Epinions, MovieLens, or other web sites centered around
things (books, video games, movies, beers, vacation spots, plants, etc.)
and what people think of them, except this site is non-commercial,
editable by all, open content, open source. Users can create items and
even categories!

We are where Wikipedia was in 2001: a glorious idea to take over the
universe, not yet much content. That's where you come in! There are
still tons of features to add and bugs to squash. However, it's no fun
without users, so we'd greatly appreciate if you'd create an account and
try us out. Rate a few things, create some items, make some comments,
invite some buddies. Remember, the most important thing is your
opinions; the facts of a page are useful, but not as useful as ratings
or reviews. Most of all, have fun!

If you decide not to come back, tell me why. As we get feedback, we can
do the most important things first.

Feel free to answer questions or give feedback, either here, on
wikilens.org, or to dfrankow at cs.umn.edu.

Dan Frankowski

==============================================

Here is some additional detail if you want to more info.

*** STRUCTURE

You can think of the system as

- a wiki
- a recommender
- a social network (buddies' ratings influence your recommendations)

*** MOTIVATION

I am the staff scientist for GroupLens research at the University of
Minnesota, which has been studying recommender systems since the mid
90s. Our most well-known site is http://www.movielens.org, a movie
recommender. However, it does not allow much in the way of contribution,
and it is movies only. I am engaged in a project called "Recommenders
Everywhere", where we try to build tools and/or websites that allow
anyone to make recommenders to use people's opinions to sift through
content. See also http://wikilens.org/wiki.php/RecommendersEverywhere.

*** IT'S NOT MEDIAWIKI

As a Wikipedia user, you might ask, "Why is this system not based on
MediaWiki, my favorite?" I tried installing MediaWiki when I started
this project, and it wouldn't install without register_globals, and even
still I couldn't get it to work. Thus, I chose another popular wiki,
PhpWiki. Of course now MediaWiki is super easy to install and beautiful
looking. If I had to choose now, I might choose MediaWiki. However,
we're already invested in PhpWiki, and are unlikely to switch any time
soon unless there is an active user community clamoring for it.