Knowledge

Wikipedia-Based Resource Sharing

The Idea

A useful property of Wikipedia is that each Wikipedia article talks about a unique topic and has a unique address (URL). With this property, we can enable people with the same interest to meet at the same Wikipedia article, and exchange information about resources of common interest, such as books, products, services, jobs and experts.

Implementation

Ideally, the best approach to implement the above vision is to persuade Wikipedia to provide a discussion forum for every Wikipedia article. However, the Wikimedia Foundation showed little interest. Therefore a third party has to take the initiative.

The good news is, even if there are no such discussion forums, people sharing the same interest can still discover each other:

1. go to the Wikipedia article that represents their common interest;
2. get the article's title (which usually is the term for that interest) and google it;
3. Google should be returning Web pages that document people and resources related to this interest.