On Dec 19, 2007 3:32 PM, Daniel Arnold <arnomane@gmx.de> wrote:

Am Mittwoch, 19. Dezember 2007 22:36:37 schrieb Luca de Alfaro:
> we have a demo at http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/ that features the whole
> English Wikipedia, as of its February 6, 2007 snapshot, colored according
> to text trust.

I looked at the demo at http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu:80/index.php/Moon . Most
remarkably in this example is a whole section with a private original
research theory on "Binary planet systems". So sadly (or luckily? ;-) the
latest version in your snapshot contains a bad edit; compare it also to the
relevant edit in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon&diff=prev&oldid=107099473

So your algorithm highlighted the wrong content. The problematic part is a bad
summary of an older origin of moon theory which is beeing described here
overly simplified with some ad-hoc-erisms and thus is made even more wrong by
the author of these lines (OT: I probably know the author of these lines from
de.wikipedia: he tried to post this and other private theories in several
astronomy articles).

Ok. How did Wikipedia work out in that case? It took a little more than an
hour to revert this. So Wikipedia was able to resolve this problem with the
current tools rather quickly. :-)

This doesn't mean we don't need your stuff. Quite the contrary. I come to some
very promising and interesting (and maybe non-obvious) use cases:

1) The (German) Wikipedia DVD.
The basis of the Wikipedia DVD is a database dump. The first Wikipedia CD and
DVD contained an "as is" snapshot transformed to the Digibib reader format of
Directmedia Publishing GmbH
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directmedia_Publishing). However these
snapshots had the above problem with short lived nonsense content that
happened to be in the snapshot. For the DVD's up to now different trust
metrices were used in order to find the "latest acceptable article version"
out of a given snapshot. One metric was the "latest version of a trusted
user". The current DVD from November 2007 uses a "user karma system" in order
to find the latest acceptable version (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directmedia_Publishing if you can read German,
however the karma system doesn't get described there). So I think
that "offline Wikipedias" such as the Wikipedia DVD and Wikipedia read only
mirrors would benefit a lot from your effort in order to know which most
recent version of a given article is the one they should provide to their
readers.

2) A combination with the reviewed article version.
Several people pointed out that they fear the reviewed article version need a
lot of checks depending on configuration mode if latest flagged or current
version is shown by default. Furthermore there are different opinions which
one of both modes is the best.
How about this third "middle ground" mode: If the karma of a given article
(according to your algorithm) version falls below a certain karma threshold,
the latest version above this theshold is shown by default to anon readers if
there is no newer version flagged as reviewed.
That way anon people usually see the most recent article version and we always
can overrule the alorithm which is a good thing (TM) as you never should
blindly trust algorithms (you know otherwise people will try to trick the
algorithm, see Google PageRank).

The drop below a certain karma threshold could be highlighted via a simple
automatically added "veto" flag, which can be undone by people that can set
quality flags.

That way we would have three flags (in my favourite system): "veto", "sighted"
and "reviewed". The veto flags makes only little sense for manual application
cause a human can and should (!) do a revert but it would be very useful for
automatic things (automatic reverts are evil).

Cheers,
Arnomane