expanding lw user pages

[John Salvatier]

I think expanded user pages would be good for public goods because it will allow people to know other users' interests, making collaboration easier.  

Thus I would like to find a way to get this done. Option 1 is to do it ourselves. It doesn't look too complicated, but it would probably take a while to familiarize ourselves with the code. Option 2 is to put up a small bounty for making a patch that gets accepted. This means someone else will do the work, but perhaps Laurent is concerned about "punished by rewards" issues (I have the book but still haven't read it).

What are people's thoughts and preferences?

[William Ryan]

CC'ed Matt on this thread, since he is currently maintaining LW.

The biggest thing I think the user pages need is location data, a place to enter your zipcode and locate/communicate with others nearby.

Strongly agreed that having interests, etc, could make collaboration much more effective.

[Matthew Fallshaw]

Some notes on how to make custom user pages work fairly cheaply:

1. The wiki already has user pages, and most LW users have a matching wiki username (gwern, VN)
2. LW already knows how to pull content from the wiki and display it as local content (https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong/blob/master/r2/r2/controllers/wikipagecontroller.py)
3. 1 + 2 nearly equals custom user pages

On location data:

User profiles already have a "location", but I think that's currently an unchecked plain text field. We had planned on eventually dressing that up in the same way meetup locations are (geocoded on entry). The meetups code has examples of showing maps and etc. that would provide plenty of hints about how to implement similar behaviour on user pages.

We're unlikely to get to any of this for at least a couple of months and probably longer. We'd be happy to help unstick anyone working on this who got stuck (for values of "we" that probably include [Wes, Dave]).