wsdm-topic-selection
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at WSDM or a neighbor - tests for the web/social-data core and the practical-yet-principled bar, scope coverage from web search and recommendation to social networks and responsible web AI, routing against SIGIR, KDD, WWW, CIKM, RecSys, and ICWSM, and long-versus-short-track fit.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill wsdm-topic-selection --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# WSDM Topic Selection Decide if a project is WSDM-shaped before anyone formats a page. WSDM (pronounced "wisdom") is deliberately narrow: search and data mining **on the Web and the Social Web**, run as a small, highly selective, traditionally single-track winter meeting jointly sponsored by four ACM SIGs (SIGIR, SIGKDD, SIGMOD, SIGWEB). The sponsorship list is the scope diagram - the venue lives at the intersection of retrieval, mining, data management, and the web itself. ## The two-gate test **Gate 1 - the data gate.** Is the primary object of study web or social-web data: queries and clicks, documents and links, user-item interactions, social graphs, ads, reviews, conversational sessions? A method paper whose experiments merely *include* a web dataset fails this gate; the web data must be what the contribution is *about*. Tabular-ML, vision, and generic NLP work fail here regardless of quality. **Gate 2 - the "practical yet principled" gate.** The series describes its emphasis as practical yet principled approaches, and the PC enforces both adjectives: - *Practical*: plausible at platform scale, aware of serving cost, evaluated on realistic interaction data. - *Principled*: a
- The two-gate test
- Scope coverage check (2026 CFP areas)
- Routing table
- Selectivity realism
- Routing vignettes (fictional)
- Foundation-model-era fit
- Output format
What does the wsdm-topic-selection skill do?
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at WSDM or a neighbor - tests for the web/social-data core and the practical-yet-principled bar, scope coverage from web search and recommendation to social networks and responsible web AI, routing against SIGIR, KDD, WWW, CIKM, RecSys, and ICWSM, and long-versus-short-track fit.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill wsdm-topic-selection --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.