SuggestBot is a program that attempts to help Wikipedia users find pages to edit based on their past contributions. If you want to try it out and get some personalized recommendations, please leave your user name on our request list. You can also sign up to receive suggestions regularly. If you're wondering what the bot's recommendations looks like, you can find an example on Nettrom's user talk page.

SuggestBot uses a variety of algorithms, including standard information retrieval and collaborative filtering techniques, to make suggestions. Most of it runs at the GroupLens Research Lab on various machines, some parts also run on the Wikimedia Toolserver. The recommendations are done based on downloading a list of a user's contributions (to avoid recommending articles they've recently edited). The bot was originally developed by ForteTuba.

If SuggestBot made personalized recommendations for you, please leave feedback on whether they were useful and how to make them better. Comments on recommendations, as well as general comments, suggestions, or complaints, are best left on our talk page. Comments are welcome and valuable, as they will help us make SuggestBot do a better job of helping Wikipedia.

[edit] Getting recommendations

We currently offer two ways of getting article recommendations:

• For a one-time post to your user talk page, add your name to our request list
• To receive recommendations at regular intervals we have written instructions on how to sign up using a userbox or templates.

[edit] Current Status

SuggestBot is currently part of a research study where we add some information to the suggestions sent to users who have signed up to get suggestions regularly. For more information please see the research project's page on meta.

[edit] Limitations/issues

• Some people would like wanted articles (redlinks). Hard because the only info we have on a redlink is a title and the pages that link to it -- no edit history to work from. Might be able to do this.
• Someone suggested removing section stubs from the stubs list. Probably the right thing to do.
• Needs to eventually, automatically, re-download lists of articles.
• Only reads up to N (currently N=500) of a person's most recent edits when making recs. It tries to get older edits from a dump, in order to not recommend articles people have edited in the past, but this isn't perfect because dumps go out of date (there might be a gap between your last 500 edits and any edits it finds in the dump, and articles in that space might be recommended).
• Doesn't handle redirects (also leading to recommendation of already-edited pages). This appears to be a relatively minor issue based on a little bit of testing of recommended items. I'd like to do this on the back end, so that if a person has edited several versions of a page, SuggestBot would "know" that they were all the same page (and maybe do better).
• Ignores anything outside of main namespace (taking article talk pages into account might be interesting, a better representation of people's interests than just edits of articles directly. On the other hand, people often post on talk pages of articles they'd like to see deleted?)...

[edit] Changelog

• Added a new parameter "replace" to the template and userbox used for signing up to get suggestions regularly, makes the bot replace the latest existing set of suggestions (if present). We have also made changes to one of our recommenders to improve the quality of suggestions, as well as various minor bugfixes. 18:11, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
• Switched to a template-based system for signing up to get suggestions regularly. At the same time we also made it possible to get the suggestions delivered to a sub-page in your userspace for those who prefer them to stay away from their user talk page. We've also made sure the bot will not recommend the same articles over and over again. 15:54, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
• Fixed problems posting to talk pages for users with extended-char usernames by moving to the pywikibot framework. It also appears to have fixed the problem of not being able to post to some users talk pages. -- 16:17, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
• Try to improve profiles by ignoring minor and disambig edits. -- 11:28, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
• Kick over coedit recommender to 7-17 dump. -- 11:28, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
• Removed random recommendations, they were rarely followed. -- 05:01, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
• Eliminate most previously edited articles by looking at a relatively recent local dump. Many dumps fail on en, and processing them takes days, so for now we're on a mostly-processed version of the 2-19-06 dump. -- 16:24, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
• Maybe fixed all accented character issues? -- 15:58, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
• Add a filter to not recommend articles in the top N% (N=1) of edited articles -- a better way to handle the controversial article problem, and consistent across recommendation algorithms. -- 00:11, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
• Instead of recommending among all articles, focus on recommending articles tagged as stubs or needing work. (Somewhat like OpenTask but giving more weight to stubs since there are so many more of them.) -- 21:49, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
• Expand edit removing to include protection actions. -- ForteTuba 16:16, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
• Make some random recommendations, to make sure all articles get recommended eventually (a la User:Pearle's maintenance of Template:Opentask). -- 18:48, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
• Harshly penalize articles with lots of links in the link-based recommender, to recommend fewer popular pages (that presumably have less opportunity to contribute to). -- 16:35, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
• Remove many edits as input to recommendations, if the comment suggests they're reverting vandals. These edits appear to cause recommendations to zero in on controversial pages. -- 16:35, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
• Fix many accented character issues. -- 21:41, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] See also

• Same kind of bot on the Norwegian Wikipedia at no:Bruker:AnbefalingsBot, and on Swedish Wikipedia at sv:Användare:FörslagsBot