Hi everyone,

I've been hacking on a new tool and I thought I'd share what (little) I have so far to get some comments and learn of related approaches from the community.

The basic idea would be to have a browser extension that tells the user if the current page they're viewing looks like a good reference for a Wikipedia article, for some whitelisted domains like news websites. This would hopefully prompt casual/opportunistic edits, especially for articles that may be overlooked normally.

As a proof of concept for a backend, I built a simple bag-of-words model of the TextExtracts of enwiki's Category:All_articles_needing_additional_references. I then set up a tool [1] to receive HTML input and retrieve the 5 most similar articles to that input. You can try it out in your browser [2], or on the command line [3]. The results could definitely be better, but having tried it on a few different articles over the past few days, I think there's some potential there.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Specifically:

* If such a backend/API were available, would you be interested in using it for other tools? If so, what functionality would you expect from it?

* I'm thinking of just throwing away the above proof of concept and using ElasticSearch, though I don't know a lot about it. Is anyone aware of a similar dataset that already exists there, by any chance? Or any reasons not to go that way?

* Any other comments on the overall idea or implementation?

Thanks!

1- https://github.com/eggpi/similarity

2- https://tools.wmflabs.org/similarity/

3- Example: curl https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/sunday/portugal-drug-decriminalization.html | curl -X POST http://tools.wmflabs.org/similarity/search --form "text=<-"

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