How will this site work

From Internet Personals

[edit] How will this site work?

It's not really clear to me what the Personals Wikia is going to be... about dating or will it be an actual dating site?

If it is to become a dating site, with profiles on our user pages, then it could work well if there's some way of searching for matches to multiple categories, as well as text. Gender & age could be dealt with as categories. Perhaps birth year, e.g. Category:Born 1970 would be an effective way of dealing with age.

Userboxes would be an easy way for people to add themselves to categories, as well as having an easy to read profile.

If there's no easier way to search for a certain age range, perhaps we could search by parent category, e.g. Category:Born:1970's would include all people 27 to 36.

For example, I would like to meet anyone who belonged to these hypothetical categories:

• Category:Women
• Category:Born:1970's
• Category:Language:2 or more
• Category:Yoga
• Category:Music:Indian
• Category:Religion:Naturalistic worldview

Perhaps someone who understands scripts could write a script that converts categories into a google search. In this case the categories would be given suitable titles such as Gender:Women (so that a search distinguishes between body text and category names) then this might be done by googling for:

site:personals.wikia.com "Gender:Women" "Born:1970's" "Language:2 or more" "Activity:Yoga" "Music:Indian" "Religion:Naturalistic worldview"

(Come to think of it, I could also set up a weekly Google web alert, to send me new results).

How does that sound? --Singkong2005 05:11, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I like the userbox idea. In fact, I was proposing something similar for a while. I envision two things more than what you suggested:

• Copying over all userboxes from en.wikipedia. (We might be able to persuade Wikipedians to transfer over the profiles. Jimbo Wales would no doubt support this, since he generally dislikes userboxes on Wikipedia.)
• Eventually, an open-source script (probably off-wiki or a Special page) that would perform matchmaking. It would take criteria input by the user, scan his/her own User pages (noting both userboxes and text keywords), scan all other User pages, generate a compatibility score for everyone, and print a list of the highest scores.

Seahen 23:45, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Both good ideas. Not sure how well that matching thing would work, but it would probably yield interesting results, and I'd imagine it would be way better the searches on most match-making sites. And though it would be hard to beat OkCupid.com's search, it would A. give a different kind of results, and different is good, and B. the search base would include a lot of Wikipedians, who are inherently interesting people :).

In getting Wikipedians to transfer personal stuff (e.g. userboxes) across from Wikipedia, it would be best if this project clearly aimed to create a general networking site, not just a dating site. (Maybe also allowing for blogs and journals.) So the name should reflect the more general purpose, e.g. WikiContact, Wikister, or WikiNetwork (or something with that connotation) rather than WikiDating or WikiPersonals. --Singkong2005 10:35, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Answers and Discussion for "How will this site work?"

Hi, nice to meet you! :-)

personals.wikia.com is a question and your first paragraph discribes the question of the main site.

First: I think it gives no need to create a new simple dating site. In the web are thousands with so much problems - they are only commercial, or have no quality, or have bad or no fake control. Also "Its a wiki!" is no reason. The question is "Shall we create a free and open global Dating Site with the best qualitiy, like Wikipedia for online encyclopedia?". Thats the question I think.

Of course, there is a big need for such a project. Millions would join. But there are two big defiances on the way. Please read "Creating a free global Dating Community?" on the main site.

What you wrote about categorys and the google search sounds good. Maybe let us talk about the problems and defiances, also if the promotion for this forum isnt startet at this time:

1. The user should get a search result with the basic informations from the singles: thumbnail-pictures, age, country, town, last visits etc

2. If a user create a new profile, he should have simple to activate category boxes for hobbies, sports, religion etc. Also the search engine should have simple to activate category boxes. The full text search must be only a additional option.

3. The category boxes must right translate in all languages. Some categorys will have a other name in a other language, as the direct translation. For example: The direct translation for "football" in german is "Fussball", but that means FIFA and the World Champions League and not "american football". Also some categorys would be only for some countrys, if there is no similar category in other countrys, like a special "national-sport" or things like this. The community must find the right translation and meaning for every language.

4. The user profile should be "my user profile", so that no one can edit, if Im not interesting in that or not online. Maybe a user is interestes in that, maybe not. Also the user page should have one or more pictures, the chance to upload a video of mine, maybe a chance to use a webcam, the chance to create own new wiki texts and topics and the chance to design my page self or with templates from the community.

Thanks for your message singkong!

Ingmar 16:49, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

---

Thanks for those thoughts. Yes, a lot of issues...

Re point 4 - I notice that some wikifarms (e.g. Schtuff and I think StikiPad) allow a user to create a wiki and control the level access by other users (no access/read/comment/edit). So it should be technically possible. However, it does seem that there are a lot of special programing needs for a wiki dating site.

In the meantime, perhaps we could work on a comparison of the various dating sites, with particular emphasis on the free ones. We should include social networking sites, as these are also used by people looking for partners. We could start with the material at Wikipedia:Category:Online dating and Wikipedia:List of social networking websites, and add more. Rather than having a notability requirement like Wikipedia, we could be far more flexible in what we allow. We could also keep track of sites which are not good, with suitable warnings (sticking to facts, trying to avoid comments which reflect personal preference).

Spam/promotion would be a problem, but we could see how we go just monitoring it. If it's a big problem, the relevant page(s) could be soft-protected (i.e. for logged in users only), with a note asking people to put proposed additions on the talk page.

Very interesting! --Singkong2005 16:29, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

It's right, we need a new wikimedia - dating - software. With the actual wikimedia software such a website is unfortunately not possible Singkong.

I have make a functions/ features comparison from leading dating websites (maybe 15) for the software development. Today I think we need two things for this project: coder for a new wikimedia software and for the start: interested students in the universities for such a international dating project. :)

I have do some things and I have wrote Jimmy, but he have not so much time. So we will see what comes with the next weeks... Thanks for your interest Singkong! "Ingmar 19:05, 11 May 2006 (UTC)"

Hi again. I haven't been on for ages, sorry.

I've been checking out OkCupid.com, and actually I'm very impressed with their matching system - they have an algorithm using questions written by users (with each question weighted according to an importance score given by users who answer the question). And it works quite well: I find that when someone has a high percentage compatbility with me (70 or 80% or so) there's actually a good chance I'll find their profile to be quite interesting. That's better than most. And it's a completely free site.

Have you put up your comparison of dating sites? I looked for it but couldn't see it... incidentally, I think their might be a place for some of this info at Wikipedia. -- Cheers --Singkong2005 15:48, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi! The approach with personal - and also: psychological questions from the love sience (!) - is right. But I work today on more then a single dating site. For the Web 2.0 we need much more to realize a better world. Jimmy know my work. My goal is a hyper social network through the cooperation from different organisations and companys - and i hope that this could be possible in the future. "Ingmar 16:20, 8 August 2006 (UTC)"

Sounds interesting. Check my page on social networks: http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User:Singkong2005/Online_collaboration_and_networking - it might be relevant to what you're looking at. --Singkong2005 16:37, 8 August 2006 (UTC)