WikiProjects2003

A couple of wiki-related software-development notions crossed my consciousness in recent days. Lest I lose them:

• Google-page-rank experiments: Rumor hath it that the Google search engine uses a relaxation-method algorithm to identify "better" or "more authoritative" web pages. In brief, take a network of mutually interlinked pages; give each one a weight of 1.0; then repeatedly let each page keep a fraction 15% of its former weight and distribute the remaining 85% equally among all the pages that this page has links to. (The fraction 15% is arbitrary, but something in that ballpark is reasonable.) Then repeat the process until all the weights converge to a stable set of values. If this procedure were applied internally to the ZhurnalWiki, what would be the result? My guess is that the pages ZhurnalWiki and perhaps [[FindPage?]] would get weights in the ~100 area, since everybody else links to them via standard Wiki headers and footers. A few "popular" pages like MarkZimmermann and certain "Topic" pages (e.g., TopicPersonalHistory, TopicScience, TopicSociety, ...) would also be heavily weighted. Ordinary wiki pages would probably settle down to a weight of ~0.5 or so. Some among them might do better (perhaps MyReligion and MyBusiness, two of my personal favorites). I guestimate that with a few hundred lines of Perl I could do this calculation, a similar effort to the CorrelOracle's automagical linkages among ZhurnalWiki pages.
• Graphical-diagram-generation experiments: Wouldn't it be spiffy to generate a pictorial representation of the ZhurnalWiki, with nodes for each wiki page and lines showing the links among pages? This was a deep-back-burner concept until recently, when I was typing back-and-forth with a family friend (FH) student at UMBC. I mentioned the fantasy to him, and he pointed me to http://www.buddyzoo.com --- which in turn led me to http://www.graphviz.org where I began to read about the wonders of Graphviz and the associated Dot and Webdot software. Alas, after an hour or two of messing around I haven't yet gotten these programs to actually run properly on my computer (I'm having problems with UNIX paths, I fear).

Perhaps I can make some progress on these in a few months, if there's a huge blizzard this winter that keeps me home for a week (but doesn't cut off electrical and telephone service) ...

(see also PetBibli1 (23 May 2000) re an article I wrote ca. 1979 on relaxation methods to solve Laplace and Poisson equations; see IrWishes (4 Jan 2001) for notes on information retrieval programming project plans, mostly unrealized still with the exception of the autolinker; see http://www.his.com/~z/ZhurnalWikiRefCount.html for a snapshot tabulation of the number of links pointing into each ZhurnalWiki page, not including referrals via wiki headers and footers)

TopicProgramming - TopicZhurnal - Datetag20031114

(correlates: ChatTuringTest, CloserToFine, StartingPoints, ...)