On 8/5/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
Having trawled throught their articles via the random page button, it very much seems to me like their idea is the classic case of something that appears cool on paper, but in practise doesn't pan out.
The articles which I perused, I couldn't (with my Mark I eyball) discern any useful difference between the text that was painted pink and the text that wasn't.
It is of course conceivable that I myself wouldn't know the difference between crap content and trustworthy content, but I seriously doubt it.
While this approach may have it's merits, I think the parameters need to be tweaked and certainly expanded substantially before any realistically significant results can be gleaned from such sifting.
Specifically I would note that a user who habitually tends after multiple commonly vandalized articles, would get a high "un-trustworthiness" rating... not ideal as a metric, so mechanically applied.
I must say that I disagree. Look at the article "Chomsky normal form", for instance:
http://enwiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php/Chomsky_normal_form
It's a short article consisting of an intro which is almost all white and a section called "Alternative Definition" which is almost all orange. This means (I'm assuming) that it was very recently added and that the person adding it does not have a history of adding stuff that gets kept very long. If I were fact-checking the article or inspecting the sources or whatnot (assuming I had the know-how) this is a very good indicator of where I should look.
I haven't looked hard enough at their methods or results to be able to judge how good this system actually is, but if they can get it to work (and I believe that it is certainly possible), then this could be a great tool.
--Oskar