
Serendipity in Algorithms - muchete
http://michaelschoenenberger.ch/wiki-api-v1/
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muchete
Hey! I am currently in my Bachelor Thesis about Serendipity in Information
retrieval. I built a prototype which accesses unconventional knowledge from
the MediaWiki API. Try it and let me know what you think about it! What would
you use it for? Can you think of an application for it? Thanks.

~~~
ColinWright
I would certainly use it, probably when I'm creating a new
talk/presentation/workshop in order to find connections that I might not think
of otherwise.

By its very nature I'm assuming it will be somewhat haphazard and
"incomplete", because it's not intended to be a "search engine" \- you might
want to make that clear in the brief opening blurb, otherwise people will
unfairly criticise it for not being wikipedia.

Does it always give the same results, or is there a random component
underneath? It seems to have a random component (which is good, for my
purposes) - can you tell us a little more about the randomness?

But it's an interesting thing - thank you. For how long will this link remain
working?

~~~
muchete
Thank you for your reply! Glad to hear.

You are right, I received previous feedback which was biased because of the
direct connection to Wikipedia. I'll have to promote it more independent.

Currently, it works with a minimum and maximum parameter. So if the program
finds 500 articles in relation to the search term, it picks a random number
between the 100th and the 150th article (whereas the first article would be
the most related one). I might add some settings with a slider to customize
these parameters, but the current values seemed to work fairly good for now.

The link will be working for another month at least, but I can comment the
newer one here, once I improved this first version (also in terms of visual
aspects).

~~~
ColinWright
There might be some value in having a way that people can leave their email
addresses with you, given suitable assurances about what you'll do (or not
do!) with them. At the very least you could have contact details in your
profile here on HN. If someone really likes your work there's always the
(admittedly small) chance you'll get contacted with opportunities.

Just my random thoughts ...

~~~
muchete
Thanks for your note.

If anybody has questions/feedback for me, contact me via
moregugugs@protonmail.com.

