User:Cervisiarius

Hi, I'm Bob West. I was born in Germany and live in California. I'm a PhD student in computer science at Stanford University.

Most of my research has been connected to Wikipedia in some way. For instance, I've developed Wikispeedia.net, an online game where players are given a pair of Wikipedia pages and are asked to navigate from the first page to the second page by only clicking wiki links. The data we collect this way can be used for all sorts of things, such as understanding how people connect concepts in their minds, predicting missing links, and computing the semantic relatedness between concepts. In another project, I attempted to draw a data-driven portrait of what Wikipedia editors are like by analyzing what websites they frequent. Understanding what editors are like can help Wikipedia recruit new editors more effectively.

Currently, I am involved in a collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation, where our goal is to detect missing links as well as missing articles, and to make Wikipedia more complete by adding the missing links and automatically finding good editors to write the missing articles.

For more information on my work, including publications, see my Stanford page.