User:ForteTuba

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Hi there. I'm trying to contribute to Wikipedia mostly by encouraging other people to contribute more, primarily by re-welcoming people who have been dormant for a while and by making specific suggestions of things to work on. I'm working on a tool, SuggestBot, that is trying to make good suggestions to help people. Right now I'm running it manually in order to learn whether it has any real effect compared to just re-welcoming people, and to get feedback on making it better.

[edit] Self-Introduction

I'm Dan Cosley at University of Minnesota with the GroupLens research group. We do personalization, recommender systems, and social systems (among other things).

I'm interested in making and evaluating tools that help people find pages to edit on Wikipedia, and will (hopefully soon) be looking for people to help me evaluate these tools.

We've done some other work related to Wikipedia, including a paper at CHI 2005 called "How Oversight Improves Member Maintained Communities" that showed peers are approximately as good as experts, available at http://www.grouplens.org/publications.html. We also have a more recent paper that looks at various editing policies and concludes based on both a mathematical model and actual experience in the MovieLens recommender system (http://movielens.umn.edu/) that reviewing contributions before including them in a repository doesn't directly improve quality. It also shows powerful effects on increasing contributions by doing very simple personalization of the items you ask people to work on. This is accepted to CHI 2006, and anyone who'd like to look at it can mail cosley AT cs.umn.edu for a copy.