Hi all
Most of you probably have heard of WikiTrust [1], a tool that colors parts of
MediaWiki pages based upon a calculated trust value. The demo [2] is quite
impressive. I think this would especially help us to spot "subtle" vandalism
more easily.
But WikiTrust could also solve another problem that has been coming time and
time again, and has been discussed again recently in the German community: how
to determine the main authors of an article, and how to find out who put a
specific statement into an article. Tracking and assessing authorship is
something many people are interested in, and I think I can speak for a lot of
people in saying that we would really love to have that on the German language
Wikipedia. It would be particularly helpful for print version, the method
currently used by PediaPress is more than doubtful, and is getting ripped apart
on the Verein's mailing list currently.
WikiTrust is getting more and more mature, and Luca de Alfaro and his team have
been working hard on making it a lot more efficient. The one thing that still
worries me is the fact that it would require quite a bit of storage space.
Anyway, Luca really wants to integrate it into Wikipedia and other WMF wikis --
and so do I. I think that, besides being a useful tool to the community, it
could also boost our credibility in academia, because authorship becomes much
more transparent. Compare what WikiGenes [3] does [4]. I want that for
Wikipedia. Not for making authors more prominent, but making authorship more
transparent.
So, what would it take? Where could we try it? what are the concerns?
-- Daniel
PS: I can try to supply some technical details if required, I hope Luca will
save me from getting stuff wrong :)
[1]
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/
[2]
http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php/Main_Page
[3]
http://www.wikigenes.org/
[4]
http://www.mememoir.org/