[WikiEN-l] "Software Weighs Wikipedians' Trustworthiness"

[Oskar Sigvardsson]

On 8/5/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at 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