WikiTrust - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/feeds/tag/WikiTrust en Copyright 2009 Richard MacManus readwriteweb@gmail.com Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:12:49 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.23-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Wikipedia Plans to Use Color Codes to Highlight Untrustworthy Text wikipedia_jan_09.jpgNot 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.

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]]> We first wrote about WikiTrust in June 2008, though the idea of color-coding recent edits in Wikipedia has been around for much longer. Now, however, the Wikipedia team has decided to make WikiTrust a default feature for the English Wikipedia.

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In order to compute an author's standing within the Wikipedia community, WikiTrust analyzes how long an author's contributions stayed live on the site before they were changed or reverted. The longer an editor's contributions last on the site, the higher that editor's reputation will be. In addition, WikiTrust also looks at the text itself and examines the reputation of all the author's who edited this portion of the text.

The basic assumption here is that the more people look at an article and decide that it doesn't need editing, the more trustworthy the text must be. For a more detailed look at how exactly WikiTrust computes an author's and text's reputation, have a look at this presentation (PDF) the WikiTrust team gave at the recent Wikimania 2009 conference.

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As Wikipedia doesn't want to deter new editors, the implementation of WikiTrust on the English Wikipedia will not display a user's reputation but focus on the trustworthiness of the text instead. By default, WikiTrust will also be turned off and users will have to turn it on themselves if they want to see the color-coded version of an article.

If you want to try out WikiTrust today, before the system goes live on the English Wikipedia, you can try out this Firefox add-on. For a slightly different view of who edited an article and how often it was edited, also have a look at the WikiDashboard GreaseMonkey script.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_color-codes_reputation.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_color-codes_reputation.php News Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:49:31 -0800 Frederic Lardinois WikiTrust Evaluates Wikipedia Text by Author Reputation 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.

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]]> Reputation in this case is determined by an author's history of past contributions - getting your additions to the site quickly reverted away hurts your reputation in the system and casts doubt on what you add to other articles in the future. Suspect text is color coded in different shades of orange and clicking on orange text will load the version of a page where that text was added. We think this is a really exciting idea.

First blogged about on the fantastic group blog SmartMobs, WikiTrust has the potential to be applied to any wiki anywhere. The researchers building it say they are now working on a version that will process the live content of Wikipedia in real time.

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For now you can navigate around the WikiTrust dump of Wikipedia, including using the search box. It's very fun to use. The entry for file format RSS, for example, is written by solid authors with relatively little history of contested text. The entry for "God", on the other hand, is almost entirely written by authors whose reputations are highly suspect! That's the case with the version of the God article saved in WikiTrust at least.

We think that this system for determining author reputation seems like a good one - do readers agree?

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikitrust.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikitrust.php Products Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:05:54 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick