Citation analysis

[Walt Freitag]

It occurs to me that listing Forge threads in descending order of how many times each thread was linked to by another thread would make it easier to find some of the boilerplate threads that are often useful to refer new members to... because they're likely to have been so cited before.

What would be necessary would be a program that would search the threads for [url] tags, parse the URLs for whether they link to a Forge thread, and compile a count for each thread linked to.

The basic idea is to leverage the work already performed by posters who've gone to the trouble of linking to prior threads in their posts. Ron probably knows a lot more about the utility and possible pitfalls of doing this. (For example, would having fewer people looking through old threads for references cause some old threads of merit, which just by chance haven't been linked to before, to be prematurely forgotten?)

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Walt,

This sort of thing is Clinton's bailiwick, actually. The good news: it happens that an algorithm something like what you're describing is being developed already, for a kind of thread-based glossary thing deal. Just how real this is at the moment, and how long it will be before it goes live, isn't something I know, but I do know it's happening.

Best,
Ron

[Clinton R. Nixon]

This sort of thing is Clinton's bailiwick, actually. The good news: it happens that an algorithm something like what you're describing is being developed already, for a kind of thread-based glossary thing deal. Just how real this is at the moment, and how long it will be before it goes live, isn't something I know, but I do know it's happening.

Right now, it's still in the planning stages. It's a project that's at the limit of my technical skills, to be honest, but I do plan to implement it - as part of a new unifed Forge system - in 3 to 6 months.

[Walt Freitag]

That sounds great. I was thinking of it as a quick and dirty solution, but having it as part of a real indexing system would be even better.

My reference to Ron was in his capacity as a scientist. Citation statistics for papers have become an increasingly prevalent tool in research.

- Walt