[Wikiquality-l] Wikipedia colored according to trust

[Daniel Arnold]

Am Mittwoch, 19. Dezember 2007 22:36:37 schrieb Luca de Alfaro:
> we have a demo at http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/ that features the whole
> English Wikipedia, as of its February 6, 2007 snapshot, colored according
> to text trust.

I looked at the demo at http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu:80/index.php/Moon. Most 
remarkably in this example is a whole section with a private original 
research theory on "Binary planet systems". So sadly (or luckily? ;-) the 
latest version in your snapshot contains a bad edit; compare it also to the 
relevant edit in Wikipedia: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon&diff=prev&oldid=107099473 

So your algorithm highlighted the wrong content. The problematic part is a bad 
summary of an older origin of moon theory which is beeing described here 
overly simplified with some ad-hoc-erisms and thus is made even more wrong by 
the author of these lines (OT: I probably know the author of these lines from 
de.wikipedia: he tried to post this and other private theories in several 
astronomy articles).

Ok. How did Wikipedia work out in that case? It took a little more than an 
hour to revert this. So Wikipedia was able to resolve this problem with the 
current tools rather quickly. :-)

This doesn't mean we don't need your stuff. Quite the contrary. I come to some 
very promising and interesting (and maybe non-obvious) use cases:

1) The (German) Wikipedia DVD.
The basis of the Wikipedia DVD is a database dump. The first Wikipedia CD and 
DVD contained an "as is" snapshot transformed to the Digibib reader format of 
Directmedia Publishing GmbH 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directmedia_Publishing). However these 
snapshots had the above problem with short lived nonsense content that 
happened to be in the snapshot. For the DVD's up to now different trust 
metrices were used in order to find the "latest acceptable article version" 
out of a given snapshot. One metric was the "latest version of a trusted 
user". The current DVD from November 2007 uses a "user karma system" in order 
to find the latest acceptable version (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directmedia_Publishing if you can read German, 
however the karma system doesn't get described there). So I think 
that "offline Wikipedias" such as the Wikipedia DVD and Wikipedia read only 
mirrors would benefit a lot from your effort in order to know which most 
recent version of a given article is the one they should provide to their 
readers.

2) A combination with the reviewed article version.
Several people pointed out that they fear the reviewed article version need a 
lot of checks depending on configuration mode if latest flagged or current 
version is shown by default. Furthermore there are different opinions which 
one of both modes is the best.
How about this third "middle ground" mode: If the karma of a given article 
(according to your algorithm) version falls below a certain karma threshold, 
the latest version above this theshold is shown by default to anon readers if 
there is no newer version flagged as reviewed.
That way anon people usually see the most recent article version and we always 
can overrule the alorithm which is a good thing (TM) as you never should 
blindly trust algorithms (you know otherwise people will try to trick the 
algorithm, see Google PageRank).

The drop below a certain karma threshold could be highlighted via a simple 
automatically added "veto" flag, which can be undone by people that can set 
quality flags.

That way we would have three flags (in my favourite system): "veto", "sighted" 
and "reviewed". The veto flags makes only little sense for manual application 
cause a human can and should (!) do a revert but it would be very useful for 
automatic things (automatic reverts are evil).

Cheers,
Arnomane
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