ReadWriteWeb

Not sure how trustworthy those Wikipedia articles really are? A few months from now, the addition of WikiTrust as a standard feature for the English Wikipedia will give users one more tool to evaluate the trustworthiness of Wikipedia articles and editors. WikiTrust, an extension for MediaWiki, the software as the core of Wikipedia, assigns a color code to each word in an article, depending on the author's reputation and how often the text has been edited recently.

Researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz have built a test extension called WikiTrust that evaluates every word on Wikipedia and highlights text that was added by authors with a less than stellar reputation.

The research is only live on a cached copy of Wikipedia right now, but it targets what's possibly the biggest need Wikipedia has as it tries to grow into greater mainstream use - trust in an open system.