Re: [Wikitech-l] [Google Summer of Code '13] Project Idea - Inspire Me Button

[Cheng Xing]

Thanks for all the feedback to my proposal.  I really appreciate it.

If we want to provide personalized recommendations, user data does need to
be connected for the best results, and yeah things could probably get a
little iffy with the privacy policy.

In terms of gathering data for the recommender systems, I initially had
three ideas:
1) Cookies (my least favorite)
2) Reading data saved in user accounts

Because of the privacy policy, (1) and (2) are out of the game.  The third
one might get around this issue, though.

3) Facebook App

By using Facebook, not only can we use collaborative filtering techniques,
we can also use network-based techniques, and this is something unique with
Facebook.  The data is gathered by Facebook (and possibly the app), not
Wikimedia, and this could be stressed with a disclaimer.  This could be an
app run in the Facebook core, but it might be better if it's run separately
with a Facebook plugin.

I'm just not sure if Wikimedia content can be used in apps like that.  It
could probably benefit a lot of people to have a personalized recommender,
but I could see why privacy is a concern.

I do realize that if this project is approved, it will become quite big.  I
plan to take a small portion of it for GSoC to get the project, and make it
so that it can be continued in the future.  Which portion I take will
depend on what the final idea is.

I looked into Special:GettingStarted.  How does it gather data as it is
right now?  What else could be worked on?  If Inspire Me cannot be done,
this sounds pretty interesting as well.

And lastly, to Daniel: No I haven't talked to anyone directly about this
idea.  Posting in this mailing list is the first thing I did to get some
feedback, and I did get plenty of it.

Sincerely,
Cheng
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[Wikitech-l] [Google Summer of Code '13] Project Idea - Inspire Me Button

[Cheng Xing]

Hi Wikimedia Developers,

My name is Cheng Xing, and I'm interested in working with Wikimedia for
GSoC this summer.  I sent the email below to the mailing list few days ago,
but it didn't seem like it went through, so here it is again.

Thank you for your time!

Sincerely,
Cheng
-- Forwarded message --
From: Cheng Xing cxing...@gmail.com
Date: Apr 18, 2013 5:40 PM
Subject: [Google Summer of Code '13] Project Idea - Inspire Me Button
To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Hi Wikimedia Developers,

My name is Cheng Xing, and I am a freshman in Cornell University College of
Engineering planning to pursue a major in Computer Science and minor in
Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The gist of my idea is this: Create a magical Inspire Me button in the
homepage of Wikimedia sites so that it directs the user to a page that
he/she is most likely interested in. In other words, it's a page
recommender system.

For example, if a programmer clicks the Inspire Me button on Wikipedia,
articles such as the Whitespace programming language, Rubber Duck
Debugging, etc. would show up.  Things that the user probably doesn't know
about, that would probably interest the user, will show up by clicking that
button.  Very occasionally there'd be random things like Stitches, which
the user might know nothing about, but might actually be interesting.

I got this idea from three different places: Pandora, XKCD, and my own
Wikiholic-ness.  Pandora, for its impressive recommender system that uses
user accounts and likes/dislikes to track recommendation data; XKCD, for
its entertainment through their Random button; and lastly, my own
Wikiholic-ness, for its eagerness to find random interesting things on
Wikipedia.

I think the best part of Wikimedia is its ability to inspire people from
all over the world, and it has achieved this by simply presenting
information to the masses.  In my opinion, a tool that filters and
recommends information to users would be much more inspirational.  Just
imagine how many people all over the world can find their dreams this way.

I realize that this could become quite a big project, so if I get the
chance to work on this, I will do a small part (possibly the basic
infrastructure of the system) for GSoC, and I am more than willing to
continue to contribute after that.

I have some ideas of how this recommender systems would work, but this
email is pretty long as it is.  Please send me questions and comments!  I
really appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Cheng
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