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

[Parker Conrad]

For those who are interested in similar systems being used to calculate
"reputation", check out our implementation at www.wikinvest.com -- It's
different than what these guys have proposed but it's similar in that it
relies on the amount of content created & probability that an individual
user's changes will be undone to "score" contributors. We use it to identify
"top contributors" to articles, and also to give rankings to users across
the site. Think of it this way -- if I make a change to a wiki, and then
someone else edits on top of me but leaves my contributions in place, that
person has implicitly "approved" of what I wrote, and "voted" for me as a
contributor. It drastically reduces the need to patrol changes -- trusted
contributors can be identified, and scrutiny reserved for those with little
to no reputation.

/prc

On 8/5/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> David Goodman wrote:
> > from
> > Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus blog.
> > http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2278
> >
> > "software that color-codes Wikipedia entries, identifying those
> > portions deemed trustworthy and those that might be taken with a grain
> > of salt.
> >
>
> I spoke with Luca de Alfaro at length about this feature at Wikimania. I
> think the technology is great, and the performance is probably good
> enough to include it on Wikipedia itself. He assures me he will release
> the source code under a free license, as soon as it's presentable. Some
> programming work still needs to be done to make it work incrementally
> rather than on the entire history of the article, but the theory for
> this is entirely in place.
>
> There are two very important and separate elements to this:
>
> 1) A "blame map". Some might prefer to call it a "credit map" to be more
> polite. This is a data structure that lets you see who is responsible
> for what text. It can be updated on every edit. Having one stored in
> MediaWiki will enable all sorts of applications. Apparently it's
> old-hat, and not the subject of the present research, but it'll be great
> to have an implementation integrated with MediaWiki.
>
> 2) A reputation metric. This is a predictor of how long a given user's
> edits will stay in an article. It's novel, and it's the main topic of de
> Alfaro's research.
>
> These two elements could be used independently in any way we choose.
>
> The social implications of having a reputation metric are not lost on de
> Alfaro. He gives the following responses to the usual criticisms:
>
> 1. The reputation metric does not rank respected, established users --
> it has a maximum value which will be routinely obtained by many people.
>
> 2. The value of the metric for individual users is obscured. The only
> access to it is via the reputation-coloured article text. The annotated
> article text has no usernames attached, and the metric is not displayed
> on user pages or the like.
>
> 3. It's content-based which makes it harder to game than voting-based
> metrics.
>
> 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.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
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