[WikiEN-l] Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text

[Brian]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:31 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 4:10 AM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com
> >wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> >> Is it not more likely that most long-term editors who have been active
> >> for years have had most of their text mercilessly edited into oblivion
> >> and have very low average "trust" levels? And more recent editors may
> >> have higher trust levels?
> >>
> > With the disclaimer that I haven't read the paper since the 2006
> Wikimania,
> > no, the algorithm is smarter than that. Simply having your edits
> overwritten
> > at some point in the future is not going to detract from the period of
> time
> > that your edit lasted. Additionally, if some but not all of your words
> > persist through rewrites that would contribute to your reputation.
>
> If you merely revert vandalism that removes a persistent piece of
> text, doesn't that unfairly contribute to your reputation as the text
> continues to persist and the algorithm thinks that anyone who added it
> was doing so independently?
>
> Carcharoth
>
>
If you have questions like that you should probably look into the website
and the paper. I think that you'll find they realized most of these issues
and incorporated them into the algo.  They already detect reverts so it
doesn't make sense to punish the reverter.