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

[Magnus Manske]

On 8/6/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> It's time for us to think about how we want to use this technology.
> There are lots of possibilities beyond the precise design that de Alfaro
> proposes. Brainstorm away.

Well, the obvious application would be to mark edits by users whose
edits tend to be removed quickly on RecentChanges and similar pages.
Page history as well. IP edits could be grouped together by some block
metric, maybe (call it AOL flag!:-)

A new special page generating lists of pages with "suspicious" edits.
Might be useful to find long-hidden vandalism. Or not, if the metric
gets better with time...


I also have some questions: What happens if a page is blanked by
someone and then restored by me? Am I awarded all the "points" for all
future versions of that page? Is the metric then "cleared", meaning,
reset to my metric? What about partial text removal/restoration? What
if I move some text around within the page?

Also, heavily changed text is not neccessarily bad. For example, wat
if I hadd realy badd tyops, but would write good (information-rich,
NPOV, referenced) content? People will fix my typos and grammar, and
I'll get a "bad" metric, right? (One can probably filter for the
occasional typo not to influence the metric, though).

The same thing, other way around: A vandal changing dates ever so
slightly, will he show up? Or will a minor-typo-filter hide him behind
a threshold?


About the concern that was raised in another reply to your mail: One
can probably figure out who wrote a highly flagged passage of a page
by going through the history of that page. But, even if someone does
that, what's the point? The metric will change over time, right? So, a
newbie might be flagged like this in the beginning, when (s)he is not
member of the cabal yet, but that will change once (s)he becomes a
productive member of the happy wikipedia family, correct? Besides, I
doubt that such retro-engineered metrics would ever be a socially
accepted argument on the project. I don't see a real problem here.

Magnus