2007/7/29, Luca de Alfaro luca@soe.ucsc.edu:
We first analyze the whole English Wikipedia, computing the reputation of each author at every point in time, so that we can answer questions like "what was the reputation of author with id 453 at 5:32 pm of March 14, 2006". The reputation is computed according to the idea of content-driven reputation.
For new portions of text, the trust is equal to (a scaling function of) the reputation of the text author. Portions of text that were already present in the previous revision can gain reputation when the page is revised by higher-reputation authors, especially if those authors perform an edit in proximity of the portion of text. Portions of text can also lose trust, if low-reputation authors edit in their proximity. All the algorithms are still very preliminary, and I must still apply a rigorous learning approach to optimize the computation. Please see the demo page for more details.
One thing I find peculiar is that adding a text somewhere can lower the trust of the surrounding text while at the same thing heightening that of far away text. Why is that? See for example http://enwiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php?title=Collation&diff=prev&... - trust:6 text is added between trust:8 text, causing the surrounding text to go down to trust:6 or even trust:5, but at the same time improving text elsewhere in the page from trust:8 to trust:9. Why would the author count as low-reputation for the direct environment, but high-reputation farther away?