The Wikipedia For Numbers Just Made My Job Easier, But It Needs Your Help To Be Even Better
A new crowdsource site called Meterfy wants to make surfacing those numbers as easy as typing your query into a search bar.
"Meterfy is a place anyone can contribute any fact they would like about a number. It's also somewhere to discover countless numerical snippets of wisdom from absolutely every walk of life," co-founder Peter Walsham tells TechCrunch.
You could, of course, search Google for particular numbers. But the information is hard to parse through, and skimming through an article just to get this seemingly simple piece of information is surprisingly difficult.
That's where Meterfy comes in.
And it doesn't let in just useless junk, or spam, either. Meterfy encourages users to source their information. And numbers contributed by reputable organizations will certainly be trusted. You also have to create an account if you'd like to contribute to the site, which should help them keep an eye on numbers that don't add up (pun intended).
There's also more certainty when using numbers over, say, crowdsourcing text or multimedia, Walsham tells TechCrunch.
How good it is depends on how much information people contribute to it, of course, and right now there's not a whole lot. When I typed "Population" in the search bar, only some actual population numbers are surfaced, as well as the rankings of populations in certain countries.
But if numbers are your thing, or you just want to learn some interesting number-related information, the site is certainly on its way to being very useful.
Here's a sample of what you see when you type "Population" in the search bar:
