Here is a cool idea, Wikipedia links used to build smart reading lists. A grad student in physics at Harvard University has developed software that is designed to help students and other users of Wikipedia quickly find more information about a subject. As the article syas, “Software that generates a list of reading material tailored to a person's individual interests has been developed by a PhD student in the US.” The software would find additional articles that are relevant to the subject in the free online encyclopedia, and suggest the order in which they should be read. In developing the software, Alexander Wissner-Gross built from algorithm that analyzes the popularity of pages and the number of other pages that are linked to them, and another algorithm that studies the number of links between articles.
Alexander believes researchers will embrace software that would provide them with selected reading material for gaining a quick overview of a subject. I think so but students are more likely to embrace it than senior scholars. The article quotes Cornell University information networks specialist Jon Kleinberg who is optimistic about the new tool's and how it migrates some of the overload in available content, adding that Wikipedia's fairly unstructured state is similar to the early Web. "Given this, it's natural to adapt analysis techniques that have worked well for Web content," he says.
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