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

[FT2]

A bit like cryptography? If it needs obscurity to withstand gaming it's
worthless?

A metric like "this user's edits are routinely reverted" or "routinely
reverted on topic X" might be useful. Ditto a study of words used in the
revert edit's summary.

Beyond that I'm not convinced it's feasible to calculate a score for trust,
just because editors can edit in many different areas and ways. As an
extreme example, a FA editor or project page developer who uses BRD to
achieve more quicker, will score very differently from a POV warrior who
writes obscure but slightly skewed pages, or a sock user. the page text will
show reversion, recreation or aging which is useful... but the author's
trust rating will be very variable.

FT2


On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 2:48 AM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>
>