Thanks for all the feedback to my proposal. I really appreciate it.

If we want to provide personalized recommendations, user data does need to be connected for the best results, and yeah things could probably get a little iffy with the privacy policy.

In terms of gathering data for the recommender systems, I initially had three ideas: 1) Cookies (my least favorite) 2) Reading data saved in user accounts

Because of the privacy policy, (1) and (2) are out of the game. The third one might get around this issue, though.

3) Facebook App

By using Facebook, not only can we use collaborative filtering techniques, we can also use network-based techniques, and this is something unique with Facebook. The data is gathered by Facebook (and possibly the app), not Wikimedia, and this could be stressed with a disclaimer. This could be an app run in the Facebook core, but it might be better if it's run separately with a Facebook plugin.

I'm just not sure if Wikimedia content can be used in apps like that. It could probably benefit a lot of people to have a personalized recommender, but I could see why privacy is a concern.

I do realize that if this project is approved, it will become quite big. I plan to take a small portion of it for GSoC to get the project, and make it so that it can be continued in the future. Which portion I take will depend on what the final idea is.

I looked into Special:GettingStarted. How does it gather data as it is right now? What else could be worked on? If "Inspire Me" cannot be done, this sounds pretty interesting as well.

And lastly, to Daniel: No I haven't talked to anyone directly about this idea. Posting in this mailing list is the first thing I did to get some feedback, and I did get plenty of it.

Sincerely, Cheng