Enhancing Trust In Wikipedia
Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia’s reliability varies wildly. Now a computer science professor hopes to give users a better baloney detector: software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries.
Developed by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the software will color text some gradation of orange if there is reason to doubt its content. The deeper the orange, the more likely it is malarkey.
How does the software have any clue about that? Mainly by analyzing the reputations of the contributors responsible for each line.
By diving into Wikipedia’s open volumes of edit histories, the software counts the degree to which any given contributor’s work survives subsequent edits by other people. In general, the less tinkering your work on Wikipedia engenders, the more trustworthy you are deemed to be.
For now, the software — available at http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu — is in demonstration mode and operates on an older subset of Wikipedia entries. [Via]
Note: Most of the links are also orange in the demo, which I am not sure how to interpret.
Share ThisFiled under: Digital culture, Emerging Tech, News