Yaron Koren

About me: I founded and run a MediaWiki consulting company, WikiWorks. I also do some development for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. In 2007 I believe I was the only freelance semantic-wiki developer in the world. I live in New York City with my lovely wife. I've lived all around the city for the last 11 years or so, and before that I got my undergraduate degree at MIT. I grew up in Haifa, Israel, and then Amherst, MA.

My (basically abandoned) weblog.

Current interests

• These days I do exclusively MediaWiki development and consulting, mostly based around the Semantic MediaWiki extension, which I think is world-changing. To be honest, I don't have many interests beyond that at the moment. I've created a whole bunch of extensions around it, among them Semantic Forms (the best-known one), which allows for the creation of collaborative, form-based structured data; Semantic Drilldown, which provides an interface for browsing that data; and External Data, which can retrieve information from external APIs. See an explanation of all the Semantic MediaWiki extensions, and a biography of my MediaWiki development career. And you can also read two of my relevant blog posts - "Semantic wikis are the future of information" (from December 2007) and "Semantic wikis are the future of systems integration" (from May 2009).
• Español - I'm also learning Spanish.
• Music - at one time or another, I've played the clarinet, saxophone, piano, guitar, bass guitar and drums. I'm partial to indie pop, New York hip-hop and small-group jazz.

Sites I've created

• WikiWorks - my company.
• Referata - a hosting site for Semantic MediaWiki-based wikis.
• Discourse DB - co-created in 2006 with Nick Grandy; it was the basis, in one way or another, for most of the work I'v done since then. In my opinion, it was (and is) the first true wiki database.
• Betocracy - my (mostly) solo project, which let users create their own prediction markets. It's also defunct - see here for why.
• NewYorkNabes, the renter's guide to New York City neighborhoods - I programmed it; it's also defunct now.
• Computer Arithmetic Algorithms Simulator - a site I created for my dad. I did most of the layout and some of the programming.

Recommended books

Here are some books that have influenced me a lot, in the field of software development and in general:

• The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin - give users just one way to do anything, and let them undo it afterwards.
• Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug - your web site is probably more confusing than you think it is.
• The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks - when the software gets too complex, don't hesitate to start from scratch.
• Getting Real, Jason Fried et al. - stay small, keep things simple, and release quickly. Is that so hard?
• Siddhartha, Herman Hesse - talent and experience usually aren't as important as enjoyment of the task and the desire to see it finished.
• The Cash Nexus, Niall Ferguson - the most irrational mass behaviors usually have a financial explanation.
• The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb - sadly, understanding the past doesn't mean we can predict the future.

My other pages

• On Google+
• On Facebook
• On LinkedIn

Random stuff

• My Amazon wishlist - gifts are welcome!
• Articles and reviews I wrote for The Tech, MIT's school newspaper
• Analysis of my 2001 Jeopardy! appearance - I'm amazed that this exists.
• Interview of me by Nate Olson at NewAssignment.net
• Interview of me about Referata, by Jennifer Zaino at SemanticWeb.com
• Interview of me for the "Semantic Minds" interview series by Lydia Pintscher
• For no very good reason, I have an Erdős number of 2.

Family

• Prof. Israel Koren - my father. I made this page, too!
• Zahava Koren - my mother.
• Yuval Koren - my brother, co-founder of Eye-Fi, and family.