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The Wolfram|Alpha Team

Notes on the Wolfram|Alpha Community Forum

May 25, 2009 —
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The Wolfram|Alpha Community Forum has moved to the Wolfram Community. Sign up today for interesting discussions about Wolfram|Alpha and more!

We are so excited about the response to the Wolfram|Alpha Community site in the past week. Nearly 2,000 people have shared questions, ideas, and inputs since it launched on Monday, and many more are finding this forum to be a great place to communicate with others who are exploring Wolfram|Alpha.

By clicking the “vote up” button next to each post in the Community, you can increase the rank of a certain post and call it to the attention of others. For example, some of this week’s most popular posts ask about Wolfram|Alpha’s accessibility on mobile devices, and whether features will be added to cover embedded queries and chemical reactions. In its first week, Community posts were voted up more than 8,000 times.

We’re thrilled to see so many people providing guidance to each other and fostering discussions on meaningful topics. We’ll try to get feedback from the Wolfram|Alpha developers where it seems appropriate. In the coming weeks, we will begin responding to some of the posts. So if we haven’t responded to your question yet, don’t worry. We are continually adding information to and improving Wolfram|Alpha, and we hope this Community project can promote a continuous dialogue between Wolfram|Alpha and the people who use it.

27 Comments

Obviously, I have only used WolframAlpha for a short time but I regret the test requests produced rather trivial results, or no results at all, whilst being decidedly slow. Perhaps because I was expecting more I am disappointed.

Posted by m chapman May 25, 2009 at 4:11 pm

Just keying in GDP gives the GDP of the world with a list of the top 5 countries, a graph since 1990 etc etc. Not bad for a start.

Posted by Brian Gilbert May 25, 2009 at 4:28 pm

I can’t believe that after such an amusing opening that even made many forums declare as this site being the Rival of Google, the links of this website blog are appearing as broken…

“Watch the archived webcast shot in real time Friday, May 15, 2009 »”, on top of the page is broken

Posted by Usman ur Rehman Ahmed May 25, 2009 at 8:34 pm

    Hi –

    We checked the link this morning and it appears to be working. Please let us know if you are still having problems viewing the archive footage. Thanks!

    Posted by The PR Team May 26, 2009 at 10:34 am

      Just keying in GDP gives the GDP of the world with a list of the top 5 countries, a graph since 1990 etc etc. Not bad for a start.
      unbelivable!

      Posted by dressers October 18, 2009 at 6:22 pm

I love you W|A I want to help with translation into Spanish

Posted by Jorge García Gil May 25, 2009 at 9:53 pm

    W|A is promising to become an amazing new tool for public data access, analysis and various computations. W|A is in the process of tune-up and Wolfram Alpha Community forum was created (and grew exponentially) as the main means of communication between users and W|A team.

    Posted by silver October 21, 2009 at 11:37 am

Testing W|A this past week was greatly enjoyable and educational. W|A is promising to become an amazing new tool for public data access, analysis and various computations. W|A is in the process of tune-up and Wolfram Alpha Community forum was created (and grew exponentially) as the main means of communication between users and W|A team. This is why, I think, forum may also get a few tune-ups. If any of the features below are already implemented, please comment on how to access them.
1. See all post/comments by a particular user (or search forum by username)
2. See all of your own post/comments and stats for them (number replies, votes, dates) in your user account page
3. Auto removal of empty comments (yes, there are such)
4. Filter according to WA categories (you see them when you write a post): “Neat inputs”, “Bug reports”, “New subject requests”, “General comments” and create more categories to filter
5. Button “Report Spam” for sending WA team links to empty or spam posts/comments
6. Multiple posts with same topic: during a new post submission automatically search for and suggest reading posts with similar title (before submission is done). There are a lot of posts with almost identical content.

Posted by Vitaliy Kaurov May 25, 2009 at 10:51 pm

“In the coming weeks, we will begin responding to some of the posts.”

Please don’t take weeks. Posting new suggestions each day is beginning to feel like a monologue.

Posted by Joe May 25, 2009 at 11:03 pm

    I agree with Joe. If you don’t show that you’re working on at least some of our suggestions, then you will lose voluntary suggestions very soon… Just make a progressive list somewhere in the community pages of all the issues you’ve fixed, added, updated, …

    Posted by Jack May 27, 2009 at 6:10 am

    Testing W|A this past week was greatly enjoyable and educational. W|A is promising to become an amazing new tool for public data access, analysis and various computations. W|A is in the process of tune-up and Wolfram Alpha Community forum was created (and grew exponentially) as the main means of communication between users and W|A team

    Posted by pottery October 21, 2009 at 2:54 pm

Hi,
I used Wolfram|alpha for a while. Definitely looked very interesting. Especially while getting the computed data. However I felt it doesn’t pull latest data. For Example I typed in “Cyclone Aila” which is currently devastated West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh Coasts. It didn’t show up any results. Also when I type “Hurrican Katrina” I received good information.

I tried the engine by typing my name, but still it didnt show up any data. I typed in “tiger” it presented a good data on tigers. I think may be you can add up a small picture also.

Overall it is really good.
Regards,
Arghya

Posted by Arghya Goswami May 26, 2009 at 1:13 am

I’m a working mom. During free time, I devoted my time navigating through Wolfram Alpha. I just love it!

Posted by L Empinado May 26, 2009 at 4:07 am

You have to give time to the Devs to add information as they come and is carefully review so there is not issue with visitors. Don’t expect W|A to have all the answers in just a few days. Let the project grow – Spent about 4 hours today on the site and it’s amazing. Thanks for the Great Contribution.

Posted by MannyG May 26, 2009 at 11:15 am

    You have to give time to the Devs to add information as they come and is carefully review so there is not issue with visitors. Don’t expect W|A to have all the answers in just a few days. Let the project grow – Spent about 4 hours today on the site and it’s amazing. Thanks for the Great Contribution.

    Posted by buffet October 20, 2009 at 4:26 am

Just wanted to say you all have a great forum. Seems like a good place I can actually be a part of. 🙂

Posted by JJAllenFit June 6, 2009 at 12:27 pm

Which is the very good movie in 2009? Please help!Thank you.

Posted by asytonyaa June 12, 2009 at 3:31 am

Great post! I’ll subscribe right now wth my feedreader software!

Posted by KattyBlackyard June 14, 2009 at 7:55 pm

Just wanted to say hi and see how everyone’s doing – I’m new to the forum.

Posted by varaorepe July 1, 2009 at 10:36 am

tks for the effort you put in here I appreciate it!

Posted by MichaellaS July 20, 2009 at 5:45 pm

Alpha Community Forum it’s a great forum.

Posted by baby bouncer chair October 3, 2009 at 9:16 am

It is cool, community is the best place to get contact.

Posted by Johnny April 13, 2010 at 3:05 am

It is cool, community is the best place to get contact.

Posted by Medyumlar July 19, 2010 at 7:08 am

this is definitely not work. Suning how to break the original form of this homogenization of the store

Posted by ??? ???? ?????? June 9, 2011 at 11:57 am

Immediately after a great deal considered I do believe your current concept is great plus I could say that you are usually amazing.

Posted by Scarves July 13, 2011 at 11:07 am