How do I get an article about X into your recommendation system?

There are two prerequisites: First, there must be an article on the topic in Wikipedia. Second, the article must have incoming and outgoing links to other articles. If those two are true at the time that the next Wikipedia dump is done (usually monthly by Wikimedia) then X will be a part of our system.

X is obviously related to Y, why doesn't it show up in the Encyclopedia results?

Our recommender system aims to show you articles that you don't know about in order to help you discover more about a topic. In other words, we intentionally don't show the obvious results. Sometimes our system is a overly aggressive in pruning obvious results even when they might be useful. This is one of the areas that we'll continue to optimize in upcoming updates to our engine.

The results for related music, companies, authors in the Encyclopedia aren't so great. Why?

That's one of the last features that we added before we went into a feature freeze for our public beta and is still considered a work-in-progress. We've noticed that the quality of the results usually drop off significantly after the first five or so results. We'll be working on optimizing our category-results in the near future.

Why doesn't page X render properly in the Encyclopedia?

We pull our content from Wikipedia. Sometimes there's something special about a page that we've not noticed that our demo doesn't account for. If you use our contact form to file a bug we'll add it to our bug tracking system and try to figure out what's going on.

Is your technology Wikipedia-specific?

Nope. We built our prototype on Wikipedia because it's a large, free data set to practice on, and as a special bonus, there are other data sets in the same format that we could test on (e.g. Wikiquote). That said, our engine does have some variables that can be tweaked per-site to get better recommendations and we've obviously set the best values we could find for Wikipedia in the demo.

Do you plan to support languages other than English in the demo?

Yes, we'll soon be adding support for additional languages, probably starting with German and French.

Do you collect data about our customers?

No. If you're using one of our products for social sites, all that we need to know about your customers is that they can be identified by some unique identifier. We don't need names, addresses, phone numbers or any personal data. We, for instance, might know that customer 12345 is connected to event 67890, but we don't know who customer 12345 is or what event 67890 is.