Thanks for the comments! Yes, we very much wanted a system that
- does not change the day-to-day Wikipedia experience (it worked so well so far, let's not change what worked; would people be put off, or strange behaviors encouraged, by user-to-user ratings?), - encourages lasting content, but does not punish people whose content is rewritten/improved: people are mainly punished for reversions or partial reversions. - does not display reputation associated with authors (newbies to the Wikipedia provide a good share of the factual content, as they include many domain experts, so it's important not to put them off) - but still gives useful information to visitors on the trust of text (and lots more can be done, e.g., getting on request the last high trust version, ...)
As you point out, getting text diff to work is not trivial, and it took us a long time to get something we liked; we had to write it from scratch... the idea is given in the WWW07 paper: a greedy algorithm, that matches longest substrings first, giving however a bias in favor of substrings that occur in the same relative position in the pages. Moreover, we keep track not only of the text present in a page (the "live" text), but also of the text that used to be present, but has been deleted (the "dead" text). If you don't do this, reverts (and partial reverts) are not dealt with correctly. We think that even better can be done, in fact (everything can always be improved), but we haven't had a chance yet.
Luca
On 7/30/07, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
The University of Santa Cruz/California has an interesting demo up that computes author trust based on whether users' edits are kept/improved or reverted. It then highlights passages of the text according to the computed reputation of the author who added them:
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/ http://enwiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php/Special:Random
NB, this is still very experimental, but it seems promising.
Luca de Alfaro, who did most of this work, will also be presenting at
Wikimania.
Wow - that is even better than the idea of user-driven trust metrics. On top of that, it encourages activity we want to encourage; creating content that lasts and is built on. It also looks like they might have a better diff algorithm than we do.
-- mav
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