Aug 09 2007
Trusting Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been rightly criticized for the ability of cranks, obsessives and bad actors to squeeze out good material and drive knowledgable contributors completely off the site (some examples). Now comes a professor of computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz with a fairly straightforward method of ranking the reliability of articles on the site.
Other sites already employ user ratings as a measure of reliability, but they typically depend on users’ feedback about each other. This method makes the ratings vulnerable to grudges and subjectivity. The new program takes a radically different approach, using the longevity of the content itself to learn what information is useful and which contributors are the most reliable.
“The idea is very simple,” de Alfaro said. “If your contribution lasts, you gain reputation. If your contribution is reverted [to the previous version], your reputation falls.”
Dubious content is color-coded in deepening shades of orange.
Press release from UC Santa Cruz.
This sounds like a pretty good system.
(Thanks to my sister the librarian).