A new feature at Factolex: I have created a page that shows ongoing votings.

A voting takes place when someone has suggested a change to an existing term or fact. This is actually just meant to be for correcting small typos and for facts that have changed by itself (e.g. when a new mayor for a city was elected).

Also terms need to be found under multiple titles, which we call Aliases. For example people should also be able to find New York City when searching for NYC.

So, here is the page for Ongoing Votings.

Today I have re-established the ability to select text from a Wikipedia article when just adding facts to an existing term.

This feature was originally integrated when I created the feature for the Add Term page but then due to refactoring reasons (basically I moved the newly entered facts on the term page onto the sidebar) I had to remove it from the “Add a Fact” section at each term.

Probably you already know how, but still I have attached a picture on how adding facts through Wikipedia works:

Over time I plan to bring more external sources to your fingertip when adding terms or fact. I am open for suggestions on this!

It’s not quite unusual that new ideas can be hard to grasp. People come to our web page and see knowledge presented in an usual form, equipped with checkboxes and the like. We need to be able to tell everyone quickly what Factolex is about and what makes it cool and unique.

We have therefore been working on a feature that we internally call “Tour,” because it just uses one box to explain the most important functionalities of Factolex. Here is a screenshot:

But be aware that this image is only half fun because I integrated some eye-candy scrolling effect ;)

You can check it out on the Factolex Homepage or on almost every other page where we have placed it on top of the side bar.

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.

Sebastian Moser has created a cool Greasemonkey script that simultaneously searches Factolex when searching on Google. It used the somewhat unfinished Factolex API. You can see how it works on the screenshot below.

Checkout the script if you have Firefox (unfortunately does not work on Greasekit on Safari, because all GM_* functionality have been disabled there). Thanks, Sebastian!

It has been quite some time since we have posted about the ongoings at Factolex.

This was mostly due to the fact that Factolex had been just a side project besides my work at Netvibes. Also Nader is very busy at his relatively new company Compuccino.

But for me, things have been changing lately. I have left my job at Netvibes and now I will be focussing on the further development of Factolex. You can expect great things and I will write a small series of blog entries showing what progress has been done lately.

I always loved tags but now it really became apparent how useful they are. Especially in a knowledge environment like Factolex. Let’s say you wanted to display a list of:

• Cities like San Francisco, London, …
• Companies like Apple, Coca-Cola, …
• TV Series like Family Guy, Prison Break, …
• Bloggers like Michael Arrington, Om Malik, …
• Quotes by people like Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, …
• Nationalities from people like Eminem, Mark Twain, …
• …

The possibilities are endless!

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

Alex, who currently lives in Vienna, Austria is reporting the first snow and low temperatures. He built a snowman on his window sill and took a picture.

Snowman
creating a snowman dates back to at least the Middle Ages

Enjoy winter time and our special coming in December!

Late at night we reached over 200 terms and 1000 facts! :)

A couple of new terms we find interesting, have been posted by Ewald. He studies Linguistics at the University of Vienna he told us.