Jason Calacanis, ex-GM of AOL’s Netscape division, told an audience in a Chicago symposium today that he predicts that Wikipedia will be the top website, out-trafficing the second runner-up by 1000%. Wikipedia is probably the end-all be-all collaboration site — allowing anyone to discuss, edit and propose new information that is quickly fact-checked, corrected or deleted for irrelevancy. Yet does a collaboration site like Wikipedia have the opportunity to take advantage of a collaboration filter engine, such as the one provided by CRITEO? While it is hard to imagine how one could intergrate an external API into Wikipedia (which as far as I know doesn’t accept any external applications), there are thousands of other Wikis on the web using the Wikipedia engine. These secondary Wikis could definitely utilize a collaboration filtering system to prioritize interests for the casual and determined reader.

Wikipedia itself is mammoth — easily one of the fastest growing sites on the web. This is due to millions of amateur writers passionately adding and editing information with no financial compensation — the so-called long tail of the writing industry. While the top writers are dedicated to writing, they are limited and so are the funds available for those positions. This leaves an incredibly powerful long-tail of amateurs with close to professional writing or fact-checking skills. Yet the immensity of Wikipedia leaves many users in a very basic 2D linking process — they read something they’re interested in, and then they’re left with basic links to other topics that are only one-hop away in terms of relevancy. Surely this is a good system, but it can be made better, especially with a collaboration filter backing it up.

Imagine visiting a Wiki and reading about a topic you’re interested in. Normally, you could then hop to another topic closely related to that one. While interesting, I can see a future where you’d also get some top picks from others with your interests in driving towards information that might seem non-sequitir or irrelevant to the topic you’ve just read, but in reality these non-obvious topics might be of huge importance to you as a reader or researcher. For example, say you are interested in the metal gold — the Wikipedia entry on gold is big, with many links and pertinent information. Yet a collaboration filter might return to you other Wikipedia articles that are seemingly incongruent with the topic of gold metal, but after clicking to these other topics, you might find information that is very valuable to your research. You might find articles on the Great Depression (which some blame on the fall from a true gold standard); you might also find articles on cyanide leaching — a process used to extract gold from rock and stone.

The current collaboration engines are not ready to provide this specifically pertinent information — they’re better at providing an overall look at what others with your preferences are interested in. You might be interested in gold metal and bicycles, so a collaboration engine might tell you that others who are interested in both are also interested in the ocean. For Wikipedia, this might not be an attractive feature. But it DOES open the doors to what the collaboration engines might need as a step in the next direction: not just a filter that tells you what you’d like or won’t like, but also a filter that offers more than just a rating, but even a “distance” from another rated item. You might like a drama movie, and you might like a comedy movie, but they may not really be “close” in terms of relevancy to one-another. They’re both movies, they both are available on DVD, but they’re far enough apart that relevancy would need to be sorted by another factor: such as topic or category. The CRITEO engine does allow for these secondary sorts, so the opportunity to develop an interesting Wiki-plugin exists.

Who’ll be the first to try it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 1:33 am and is filed under Possible Markets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.