Archive for the ‘Features’ Category

Among the most difficult decisions we have been facing is the part about user contribution and how this should be linked to user registration.

Most of you probably know that on the big Wikipedia, they don’t force people to register to have them contribute something. This takes away a barrier for people just wanting to change something right away. The other barriers like complicated wiki syntax remain, of course.

One reason that this is possible at Wikipedia, is that if someone vandalizes a page, the next user can revert that change easily and just by himself.

Things are a little different at Factolex. As we rely on people deciding how good or bad a fact is, offending material or spam will take its time until it disappears. For this reason we decided to introduce a registration barrier but tried to ease it at several points.

The common approach: Make people register before you let them edit something

This is also the easiest to code, and most sites do it like that. The problem is that as a new user I have to give my data upfront without knowing if I like how the site does it or not.

It’s a huge amount of trust that your (unknown and not (yet) trustworthy) site asks from the user. So that’s not the way we wanted to go.

Let people enter what they intend to enter and make them register afterwards

First, let the user enter what they were just about to add. This way you don’t distract him in his creative phase.

Only then take him to the register screen.

Note at the bottom of the screenshot: We present the term that had just been entered by the user to prove that we still have it.

As mentioned earlier, this is indeed more difficult to code. It not only takes more time but also makes the code more complex, but I think it’s worth the trouble. But in fact this doesn’t go far enough for me.

Don’t really force the user to register

Now this is what I like on the web! I actually don’t want to register until I am sure that the service is useful to me. And this is also the approach we take. After you have entered a term, you will see it like this:

The grey stripes indicate that the data is not public. This way the user can use the site completely unregistered, seeing all the features in action, before he decides to register.

Even if the user does not decide to register, we reserve the right to have other users publish what has been entered by unregistered users. That way knowledge entered is never lost.

While Alex is programming the really tricky bits I just committed my first lines of PHP to enhance the knowledge experience. Next to working on design and XHTML/CSS I have to say it’s pretty relaxing to actually code something.

Factolex proudly presents another way of exploring the knowledge through … drum roll … the tagcloud.

Check it out at http://www.factolex.com/tagcloud/

You can choose to view the tags sorted by name…

or by size, ie. popularity

Just like a real lexicon or any other serious book, Factolex now has its own index of terms. This is useful when you don’t know exactly how a word is spelled or if you just want to browse around.

Check it out at http://www.factolex.com/index/

Helpful Hint
You can also type http://www.factolex.com/index/Ge to get a list of words starting with “Ge”

Want to see how terms, facts and tags evolved over time?
Click the link in the footer called Stats

Fresh out of the factolex kitchen: your personalized lexicon.

By selecting facts of terms you find relevant, factolex automatically creates your personal lexicon. This is very useful when you are doing research on a topic or just want to have a list of terms you read up on most.

Access your lexicon by clicking on the link in the header area:

Other people’s lexicon
You can also view lexica compiled by other people, for example nader’s lexicon

How it looks like

Alex finished a cool new feature: the integration of google maps on term pages with the tag “city”. This is very useful when you don’t know where a city is located. Where London is should be clear to everybody I guess :-)

How it looks like on the term page for London

The integration works automatically. You just need to click “Add a fact”, insert coordinates and the tag “coordinates”. Done.

How to enter coordinates