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

[Brian]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>

I would also point out that competition can be a very healthy thing and it
could very well be a motivating tool. Assuming an algorithm that is
difficult to game editors might well be very interested in improving their
reputation scores. It could even give some credibility to the encyclopedia.