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

[Erik Moeller]

2009/8/31 Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org>:
> On 8/31/09 7:35 AM, Michael Peel wrote:
> We've been planning to get a test setup together since conversations at
> the Berlin developer meetup in April, but actual implementation of it is
> pending coordination with Luca and his team.
>
> My understanding is that work has proceeded pretty well on setting it up
> to be able to fetch page history data more cleanly internally, which was
> a prerequisite, so we're hoping to get that going this fall.

To add to what Brion said: The author of the Wired story, Hadley
Leggett, scheduled a call with me earlier this month, but she missed
the call. I didn't have time to follow up with her after that, and she
filed the story without it. This is why there's no WMF quote in the
story.

The gist of it is that:

We're very interested in WikiTrust, primarily for two reasons:

- it allows us to create blamemaps for history pages, so that you can
quickly see who added a specific piece of text. This is very
interesting for anyone who's ever tried to navigate a long version
history to find out who added something.

- it potentially allows us to come up with an algorithmic "best recent
revision" guess. This is very useful for offline exports.

The trust coloring is clearly the most controversial part of the
technology. However, it's also integral to it, and we think it could
be valuable. If we do integrate it, it would likely be initially as a
user preference. (And of course no view of the article would have it
toggled on by default.) There may also be additional community
consultation required.

Any integration is contingent on the readiness of the technology. It
seems to have matured over the last couple of years, and we're
planning to meet with Luca soon to review the current state of things.
There's no fixed deployment roadmap yet, and the deployment of
FlaggedRevs is our #1 priority.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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