From a very fast reading of the paper at
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~luca/papers/07/wikiwww2007.pdf
I found the following problems with the paper, and some problems not covered at all * It does not take into account the problems introduced by dyslectic users. Such users can contribute a lot of info, yet the info they contribute can be completely rewritten. * User credits/reputation is unbound and therefore very difficult to use for decisions, should an user be allowed to edit a specific article or not? * Collaborations are not taken into account. This is very important as users working together usually makes very good contributions. * Users having expertise in one area, which reflects in the contributions. This will have impact on the user reputation at similar articles, ie within the same category. * Credits/Reputation is not only given as a function of an users own edits, but also as a result by the quality of the article he or she edits. The quality of the article is again given by the reputation of the users editing them, thereby creating a highly interconnected system. To anly take user contributions and reverts into account is to simple. * When credits/reputation is used for decisions like excluding an user from editing an article the decision will reinforce its own decision, so after making the decision it will become harder and harder to get over the limit to be allowed to edit an article. * If both user credits/reputation and article quality are in use there is easily introduced an instability which results in a situation whereby an user are given less credits for editing an article than the article itself are given quality points, leading to a situation where the user is blocked from editing his own article. This situation is most likely to happen when there is introduced a non-linear growth factor in credits/reputation or quality.
It could be more that I didn't notice.
John E
John Erling Blad wrote:
This is described at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Agtfjott/Article_quality_and_user_credit...
The first work on such a system is an article at (From 12. mar 2006) http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruker:Agtfjott/Artikkelkvalitet_og_brukeretter...
This article is now deleted. Links to the article at meta are posted both here, at #wikipedia, #wikimedia and several other places so it can hardly be an unknown approach to anyone.
It is also discussed to set it up as a project together with Norwegian Computing Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Computing_Center
John E
Erik Moeller wrote:
The University of Santa Cruz/California has an interesting demo up that computes author trust based on whether users' edits are kept/improved or reverted. It then highlights passages of the text according to the computed reputation of the author who added them:
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/ http://enwiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php/Special:Random
NB, this is still very experimental, but it seems promising.
Luca de Alfaro, who did most of this work, will also be presenting at
Wikimania.