Hi all
Most of you probably have heard of WikiTrust [1], a tool that colors parts of MediaWiki pages based upon a calculated trust value. The demo [2] is quite impressive. I think this would especially help us to spot "subtle" vandalism more easily.
But WikiTrust could also solve another problem that has been coming time and time again, and has been discussed again recently in the German community: how to determine the main authors of an article, and how to find out who put a specific statement into an article. Tracking and assessing authorship is something many people are interested in, and I think I can speak for a lot of people in saying that we would really love to have that on the German language Wikipedia. It would be particularly helpful for print version, the method currently used by PediaPress is more than doubtful, and is getting ripped apart on the Verein's mailing list currently.
WikiTrust is getting more and more mature, and Luca de Alfaro and his team have been working hard on making it a lot more efficient. The one thing that still worries me is the fact that it would require quite a bit of storage space. Anyway, Luca really wants to integrate it into Wikipedia and other WMF wikis -- and so do I. I think that, besides being a useful tool to the community, it could also boost our credibility in academia, because authorship becomes much more transparent. Compare what WikiGenes [3] does [4]. I want that for Wikipedia. Not for making authors more prominent, but making authorship more transparent.
So, what would it take? Where could we try it? what are the concerns?
-- Daniel
PS: I can try to supply some technical details if required, I hope Luca will save me from getting stuff wrong :)
[1] http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/ [2] http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php/Main_Page [3] http://www.wikigenes.org/ [4] http://www.mememoir.org/