On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Cheng Xing cxing561@gmail.com wrote:
For example, if a programmer clicks the "Inspire Me" button on Wikipedia, articles such as the Whitespace programming language, Rubber Duck Debugging, etc. would show up. Things that the user probably doesn't know about, that would probably interest the user, will show up by clicking that button. Very occasionally there'd be random things like Stitches, which the user might know nothing about, but might actually be interesting.
Matt is right about how the Getting Started work relates to this. I think it would be complementary rather than duplicative.
The big question for implementing a reader recommender system is where you get your data from. 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.
You might be able to do this if you limit yourself to recommending solely based on the current page, or based on user input (e.g. a recommender search with "What's your favorite article?" and some matching based on various attributes you could tinker with.)
If you're interested in recommender systems, as Matt says we are nearly ready to explore personalizing the list at Special:GettingStarted based on your past editing history. This is a slightly smaller scope, so if you want to take a whack at this, we might be able to help you along the way with advice, code review, etc. (assuming the engineers on the team don't think I'm crazy).
Steven