User:Nettrom/sandbox/SuggestBot-Signpost-Jan'13

When you are looking for interesting articles to work on the vast number of articles and tasks available can be overwhelming. I maintain SuggestBot, which aims to help by narrowing it down to articles that are similar to ones you have already expressed an interest in. Development of SuggestBot was started by Dan Cosley (User:ForteTuba) in 2005 leading to a research paper describing how it works and that it's a great improvement over random selection. I took over responsibility in early 2010, revived SuggestBot, and got a sister bot running on the Norwegian (bokmål) edition. In June 2011 we expanded to Swedish Wikipedia, and we are aiming to expand to a handful of other Wikipedias as time and interest allows.

There are two main ways of you can use SuggestBot: either getting suggestions only once, or getting them at regularly scheduled intervals. Both involve a template and for regularly scheduled suggestions we also have a userbox. Posting the suggestions are handled automatically, the requests are usually taken care of within minutes while the others are processed twice a day on English WP, once a day elsewhere. The recurring suggestions will always use your contribution history as the basis of finding similar articles. One-time requests also allow you to specify either specific articles or categories of articles and get suggestions based on those.

I continuously work on improving SuggestBot both by making sure it keeps running without error and by adding features. Over the past year we have been running an experiment where information about article views and predicted article quality were added to the suggestions. At the moment we are working on adding suggestions for specific article improvements (e.g. "this article appears to need more sources") as well. Go try out SuggestBot by asking it to post a single set of suggestions on your user talk page and let me know what you think on the bot's talk page!