[WikiEN-l] Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text

[Brian]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:42 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> Agree - trust scores are likely to be divisive and easily gamed. I do not
> think "trust score league tables" will help the project.
>
> However as they are also good ways to spot problems and see the
> "reliability
> profile" of an article on review, perhaps some way might be found to make
> some of their results available, in some limited manner? Admin only??
>
> On the assumption admins are trusted anyway so they don't have such a
> vested
> interest in numbers, but they might be interested in problem editorship.
>
> The other view is if you can see the aging or trust profile of the article,
> that's all you need. low trust-score users may simply be legitimate but
> inexperienced, bold and reverted, etc. There are other ways to ID problem
> editors, and if you need to know who wrote a specific sentence you can
> always use WikiBlame to check the history.
>
> So overall I would say you don't need to publish trust scores of users, and
> even telling a user their own trust score is merely a toehold into self
> promotion/gaming at best. People should edit, not be encouraged to keep
> scorecards.....
>
> FT2
>

Playing devils advocate, isn't there far too little information available
about your average editor? How do you determine at a glance the reputation
of an editor whose edits you are reviewing, or with whom you are having a
conversation? Further, since the full history dump is publicly available and
the given algorithm is just one of many related measures that could be
computed, is it pointless to try and stop the information from being
released? Lastly, in the interest of transparency should the information not
be made available? Shouldn't the goal be to create an algorithm that can't
be gamed? It may actually be the case that this one is not very subject to
manipulation. The authors are very astute and it would take an awful lot of
effort.