Sockpuppets? Surely this can't be more than .00000000000001% of the user base?

On Dec 19, 2007 7:05 PM, Daniel Arnold <arnomane@gmx.de> wrote:
Hello Luca,

>    1. The trust coloring rightly colored orange (low-trust) some
>    unreliable content,

Yes I was lost in translation. ;-)

>    2. and the Wikipedia people were quick in reverting it.

Yes.

> Note that we also highlight as low trust text that is by anonymous
> contributors. The text will then gain trust as it is revised.

One possible weakness came into my mind after I also read your paper. Your
algorithm is perhapes a bit vulnerable to "sock puppets". Imagine person A
with one account and person B with two accounts. Both have a medium
reputation value for their accounts. User A edits an article with his account
4 times. All 4 subsequent edits are taken together and the article has a
maximum trust value according to the user's reputation. User B makes as well
4 edits to an article but switches between his accounts and thus "reviews"
his own edits. If I understand your algorithm correctly the sock puppeted
article is trusted more than the other one.

Quite some time ago I reflected how to avoid incentives for sock puppets in
karma systems without even knowing which accounts are sock puppets:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meritokratischer_Review (sadly in German ;-).
The system described there differs from your approach but the idea on how to
avoid incentives for sock puppets without even knowing who a sock puppet is
could perhapes adapted to your system.

The basic idea for a sock puppet proof metric is is that a person has only a
limited amount of time for editing (I don't consider bots cause they are
easily detectable by humans). A single person needs the same time for e.g. 4
edits (in the following I assume each edit has the same length in bytes)
regardless how much accounts are used but two different people with each 2
edits only need half of the (imaginary) time (you don't need to measure any
time untits at all).

So the maximum possible reliability person B can apply to the article with its
two accounts (let us say each acount has 2 edits = 4 total edits) has to be
the same as the one which is possible with person A's single account (4
edits). So in general two accounts with each X edits should never be able to
add more trust to an article than one person with 2*X edits (note: edit count
number is only for illustration, you can take another appropriate
contribution unit).

> About 2, I am very glad that bad edits are quickly reverted; this is the
> whole reason Wikipedia has worked up to now.
> Still, it might be easier for editors to find content to check via the
> coloring, rather than by staring at diffs.

That's certainly true for articles not on your watchlist (or bad edits that
were forgotten and are still the latest version).

>   - Finding when flagged revisions are out of date (there may be a new
>   high-trust version later)

Well as I said I'd love to see flagged revisions and your system combined (in
a way described by my previous mail). An automated system probably always has
some weaknesses some clever people can abuse but it is very fast, while a
hand crafted system depends on the speed of individual persons but is much
harder to fool.

> BTW, as the method is language-independent, we look forward to doing the
> same for wikipedias in other languages.

Good to know. :-)

Arnomane

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