SuggestBot: Using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia

Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, Loren G Terveen, John Riedl

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

206 Scopus citations

Abstract

Member-maintained communities ask their users to perform tasks the community needs. From Slashdot, to IMDb, to Wikipedia, groups with diverse interests create community-maintained artifacts of lasting value (CALV) that support the group's main purpose and provide value to others. Said communities don't help members find work to do, or do so without regard to individual preferences, such as Slashdot assigning meta-moderation randomly. Yet social science theory suggests that reducing the cost and increasing the personal value of contribution would motivate members to participate more.We present SuggestBot, software that performs intelligent task routing (matching people with tasks) in Wikipedia. SuggestBot uses broadly applicable strategies of text analysis, collaborative filtering, and hyperlink following to recommend tasks. SuggestBot's intelligent task routing increases the number of edits by roughly four times compared to suggesting random articles. Our contributions are: 1) demonstrating the value of intelligent task routing in a real deployment; 2) showing how to do intelligent task routing; and 3) sharing our experience of deploying a tool in Wikipedia, which offered both challenges and opportunities for research.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIUI 2007
Subtitle of host publication2007 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
Pages32-41
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Event12th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2007 - Honolulu, HI, United States
Duration: Jan 28 2007Jan 31 2007

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUI

Other

Other12th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2007
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHonolulu, HI
Period1/28/071/31/07

Keywords

  • Intelligent task routing
  • Member-maintained communities
  • Online communities
  • Recommender systems
  • Wikipedia

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