Forwarded for Dan Frankowski, dfrankow@cs.umn.edu.

- d.

Have you ever wanted to toss aside that pesky "neutral point of view"? Wouldn't it be fun to get *opinionated*? Would you help with a project similar to Wikipedia, but for opinions?

Wikipedia is a community-maintained encyclopedia based on fact ("Vampire Watermelon" aside ;) ). WikiLens (http://www.wikilens.org) is a community-maintained repository of *opinion*. Right now, those opinions are expressed as ratings, comments, or lists, which are in turn digested to show people useful information. For example, ratings are turned into recommendations; lists are mentioned on each item page.

Think of Amazon, Epinions, MovieLens, or other web sites centered around things (books, video games, movies, beers, vacation spots, plants, etc.) and what people think of them, except this site is non-commercial, editable by all, open content, open source. Users can create items and even categories!

We are where Wikipedia was in 2001: a glorious idea to take over the universe, not yet much content. That's where you come in! There are still tons of features to add and bugs to squash. However, it's no fun without users, so we'd greatly appreciate if you'd create an account and try us out. Rate a few things, create some items, make some comments, invite some buddies. Remember, the most important thing is your opinions; the facts of a page are useful, but not as useful as ratings or reviews. Most of all, have fun!

If you decide not to come back, tell me why. As we get feedback, we can do the most important things first.

Feel free to answer questions or give feedback, either here, on wikilens.org, or to dfrankow@cs.umn.edu.

Dan Frankowski

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Here is some additional detail if you want to more info.

*** STRUCTURE

You can think of the system as

- a wiki - a recommender - a social network (buddies' ratings influence your recommendations)

*** MOTIVATION

I am the staff scientist for GroupLens research at the University of Minnesota, which has been studying recommender systems since the mid 90s. Our most well-known site is http://www.movielens.org, a movie recommender. However, it does not allow much in the way of contribution, and it is movies only. I am engaged in a project called "Recommenders Everywhere", where we try to build tools and/or websites that allow anyone to make recommenders to use people's opinions to sift through content. See also http://wikilens.org/wiki.php/RecommendersEverywhere.

*** IT'S NOT MEDIAWIKI

As a Wikipedia user, you might ask, "Why is this system not based on MediaWiki, my favorite?" I tried installing MediaWiki when I started this project, and it wouldn't install without register_globals, and even still I couldn't get it to work. Thus, I chose another popular wiki, PhpWiki. Of course now MediaWiki is super easy to install and beautiful looking. If I had to choose now, I might choose MediaWiki. However, we're already invested in PhpWiki, and are unlikely to switch any time soon unless there is an active user community clamoring for it.