B.T. Adler,
K. Chatterjee,
L. de Alfaro,
M. Faella,
I. Pye,
V. Raman.
Assigning Trust to Wikipedia Content.
Technical Report UCSC-SOE-08-07, School of Engineering,
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA. May 2008.
This report supersedes the Technical Report UCSC-CRL-07-09, School of Engineering,
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
Abstract
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Abstract
The Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia: anyone can contribute
to its articles simply by clicking on an edit button. The open
nature of the Wikipedia has been key to its success, but has also
created a challenge: how can readers develop an informed opinion on
its reliability?
We propose a system that computes quantitative values of trust for the
text in Wikipedia articles; these trust values provide an indication
of text reliability.
The system uses as input the revision history of each article, as well
as information about the
reputation of the contributing
authors, as provided by a reputation system.
The trust of a word in an article is computed on the basis of the
reputation of the original author of the word, as well as the
reputation of all authors who edited the text within proximity of the
word.
The algorithm computes word trust values that vary smoothly across the
text; the trust values can be visualized using varying text-background
colors.
The algorithm ensures that all changes to an article text are
reflected in the trust values, preventing surreptitious content
changes.
We have implemented the proposed system, and we have used it to
compute and display the trust of the text of thousands of articles of
the English Wikipedia. To validate our trust-computation algorithms,
we show that text labeled as low-trust has a significantly higher
probability of being edited in the future than text labeled as
high-trust. Anecdotal evidence seems to corroborate this
validation: in practice, visitors find the trust information valuable.