On 23 April 2013 11:00, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Tracking reader activity on Wikipedia is a _very_
touchy subject for a whole host of legitimate reasons, and to be totally
honest I don't think you're going to be able to implement
any recommender system based on people's reading habits.
Can't he use *broad* categories for tracking? like instead of registering
an
activity as by the article or the immediate category in which it fall, we
can
traverse up the categories until we get a category under which there are
atleast 1000 articles. This will ensure that the user is not tracked
explicitly,
like more or less he might not even notice, that he is being tracked
(Note: tracking like this doesnot make us evil :P)
For example: if a reader visits the page [Burmese rupee], then we can
traverse up
the categories like, Burmese rupee-> Rupee-> Currency denominations->
Currency->
International finance-> International economics-> Economics. And then save
the visit as an activity in category of "International economics" or
"Economics"
rather than in "Rupee" or "Currency".
Though this will make the suggestions less efficient, but it will surely
generate
insights into the active interests of the user (and thats the purpose).
Also, there can always be an option to manually register the article by the
user
(kindof bookmark/watchlist), and if he does so, the suggestions will
improve for
that user.
.
Regards
Gaurav