What is WikiLens?

You are using WikiLens right now! It is a way for anyone to rate things, and add more things (e.g., movies, books, classes, software projects) to allow anyone to rate them. Once there are ratings, we can do useful things with them (see "Why WikiLens?").

For more on how to use WikiLens, see WikiLens/Tutorial.

You can also join or view the WikiLens users email list.

Finally, you can get the WikiLens Firefox Search Engine and buy a t-shirt at Cafe Press!

WikiLens is based on the open-source project Phpwiki, which is currently downloaded 100-200 times a day (!). Some of our changes have started to be accepted into the new experimental portion of Phpwiki. Thus, this project could end up having a big impact!

Source code

You can always get the source code that runs the site at http://www.wikilens.org/wikilens-src.tgz. It is missing an "index.php" file needed to run the site. Email dfrankow -at- cs.umn.edu for more information. Once you have the source code, look at WikiLens/InstallNotes.

Why WikiLens?

Collaborative recommenders allow people to express their opinions about things, then get things recommended to them that they don't know about yet. The simplest description is 'automated word of mouth': I like "The Matrix", you like "The Matrix", you like "Reservoir Dogs" and I haven't seen it, so recommend it to me. That basic concept is extended using computers to sum across many users and many items.

Currently, community sites with collaborative recommenders are uncommon. They are only present at web sites that have unusual expertise or large amounts of money. Even those with expertise but little money eventually do not have the resources or inclination to maintain their recommenders. The surviving recommenders serve a narrow set of content, mostly things which can be bought.

Collaborative recommenders should be everywhere, as common as web servers. For more motivation, see RecommendersEverywhere.

Other pages related to this topic

What's left to do?

Tons of things!

In particular, integrate back into PhpWiki. For other things, email dfrankow -at- cs.umn.edu.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the PhpWiki team, and GroupLens. Also, this work is funded by the National Science Foundation, grants IIS 03-24851 and IIS 05-34420.