Hi there. I'm trying to contribute to Wikipedia mostly by encouraging other people to contribute more, primarily by re-welcoming people who have been dormant for a while and by making specific suggestions of things to work on. I'm working on a tool, SuggestBot, that is trying to make good suggestions to help people. Right now I'm running it manually in order to learn whether it has any real effect compared to just re-welcoming people, and to get feedback on making it better.
I'm Dan Cosley, now an assistant professor at Cornell information science. I do personalization, recommender systems, social systems, reminiscence and memory, and navigation in virtual and physical spaces (among other things). Before that I was at GroupLens research at the University of Minnesota, which has done and is doing a fair amount of Wikipedia-related research.
Other than that, not much to say right now. I wish I had more time to make SuggestBot better but right now I'm mostly keeping it going as a service to Wikipedia. Hopefully a student who wants to dig deeper will come along someday.
