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Color me trustworthy: WikiTrust codes Wikipedia pages according to contributors' reputations and how the content has changed over time.
University of California, Santa Cruz
Tracing information back to its source could help prove trustworthiness.
The official motto of the Internet could be "don't believe everything you read," but moves are afoot to help users know better what to be skeptical about and what to trust.
A tool called WikiTrust, which helps users evaluate information on Wikipedia by automatically assigning a reliability color-coding to text, came into the spotlight this week with news that it could be added as an option for general users of Wikipedia. Also, last week the Wikimedia Foundation announced that changes made to pages about living people will soon need to be vetted by an established editor. These moves reflect a broader drive to make online information more accountable. And this week the World Wide Web Consortium published a framework that could help any Web site make verifiable claims about authorship and reliability of content.
WikiTrust, developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, color-codes the information on a Wikipedia page using algorithms that evaluate the reliability of the author and the information itself. The algorithms do this by examining how well-received the author's contributions have been within the community. It looks at how quickly a user's edits are revised or reverted and considers the reputation of those people who interact with the author. If a disreputable editor changes something, the original author won't necessarily lose many reputation points. A white background, for example, means that a piece of text has been viewed by many editors who did not change it and that it was written by a reliable author. Shades of orange signify doubt, dubious authorship, or ongoing controversy.
Luca de Alfaro, an associate professor of computer science at the UC Santa Cruz who helped develop WikiTrust, says that most Web users crave more accountability. "Fundamentally, we want to know who did what," he says. According to de Alfaro, WikiTrust makes it harder to change information on a page without anyone noticing, and it makes it easy to see what's happening on a page and analyze it.
The researchers behind WikiTrust are working on a version that includes a full analysis of all the edits made to the English-language version of Wikipedia since its inception. A demo of the full version will be released within the next couple months, de Alfaro says, though it's still uncertain whether that will be hosted on the university's own servers or by the Wikimedia Foundation. The principles used by WikiTrust's algorithms could be brought onto any site with collaboratively created content, de Alfaro adds.
the introduction of various shades of orange, which would label different level of trustworthy of these labels, wild coloring of the remaining text to label racists, sexists, communist,... etc. traits, and so on...
Welcome into fractal Universe and colorful future!
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186 Comments
Who are they kidding?
The fundamental concept of Wikipedia is flawed - much like a political system, where those who most desire power are generally the least trustworthy. I worry less about planting falsehoods about living persons; I've become more disturbed at the hidden agendas in technical postings. Much like the way companies stack standards committees, (remember the scandal at IEEE?) they write Wikipedia entries to promote their points of view and gullible readers think it's gospel.
If you think about it, Wikipedia suffers the same problems the Internet does today: it was started by some idealistic academics who never considered the chaos it would sink into when commercial and corrupt interests took over.
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