Dear All:
I would like to tell you about a demo we set up, where we color the text of Wikipedia articles according to a computed value of trust. The demo is available at
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/
The trust value of each word of each revision is computed according to the reputation of the original author of the text, as well as the reputation of all authors that subsequently revised the text.
We have uploaded a few hundred pages; for each page, we display the most recent 50 revisions (we analyzed them all, but we just uploaded the most recent 50 to the server).
Of course, there are many other uses of text trust (for example, one could have the option of viewing a "recent high-trust version" of each page upon request), but I believe that this coloring gives an intuitive idea of how it could work.
I will talk about this at Wikimania, for those of you who will be there. I am looking forward to Wikimania!
Details:
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.
All the best,
Luca de Alfaro
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~luca