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Reading in Wired that there are plans to improve the reliability of information on Wikipedia: To be launched in the (Northern Hemisphere) Autumn, an optional feature called “WikiTrust” will colour code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

More than 60 million people visit the site each month, however despite this popularity, Wikipedia has long suffered criticism from those who say it’s not reliable. Because anyone  can contribute, the site has often been subject to vandalism, bias and misinformation.

To help counter this, researchers from the Wiki Lab at the University of California have created a system to help users know when to trust the information on Wikipedia. The new programme assigns a colour code to newly edited text using an algorithm that calculates the author’s reputation from the lifespan of their past contributions. It’s based on a simple concept: The longer information persists on the page, the more accurate it’s likely to be. Text from questionable sources starts out with a bright orange background, while text from trusted authors gets a lighter shade. As more people view and edit the new text, it gradually gains more “trust” and turns from orange to white.

Registered Wikipedia users will be able to click on a “trust info” tab and view the color-coded text, and the researchers expect the gadget to be ready sometime this fall.

The Wiki Lab built its trust tool around the principle that Wikipedia pages tend to improve over time, or at least to move toward consensus. You can measure an author’s trustworthiness by looking at how long his or her edits persist over time, said UCSC graduate student Bo Adler, who developed WikiTrust with de Alfaro and graduate student Ian Pye. “When you add something to Wikipedia and it lasts a long time, you did a good job,” Adler said. “If it gets erased right away, you did a bad job.” Based on an person’s past contributions, WikiTrust computes a reputation score between zero and nine. When someone makes an edit, the background behind the new text gets shaded orange depending on their reputation: the brighter the orange, the less “trust” the text has. Then when another author edits the page, they essentially vote on the new text. If they like the edit, they’ll keep it, and if not, they’ll revert it. Text that persists will become less orange over time, as more editors give their votes of approval.

“The Wiki Lab researchers have been worried about their product detracting from the Wikipedia experience, so they designed it to be as unobtrusive as possible. Because too much orange text would turn people off, they balanced the need to flag questionable text with the need to keep the page readable. They also hid the gadget in a tab at the top of the screen, so if you don’t want to bother with trust ratings, you don’t have to click on the “trust info” tab.

WikiTrust can detect most types of questionable content. But when asked whether his gadget measures “truth” on Wikipedia, de Alfaro hesitated. WikiTrust determines trustworthiness based on how many people agree with a particular passage of text, he said, but majority approval doesn’t guarantee truth. “If 20 people are all biased in one way, our tool does not know it,” de Alfaro said. “Our tool can simply measure consensus.”

At this stage the extension will be optional and will undergo extensive community testing and evaluation, as part of Wikiepedia’s overall drive to improve the reliability its content. It is likely that it will develop over time based on feedback and usability.

Posted on September 2nd, 2009 under The internet and techie toys, Uncategorized • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback