UCSC Wiki Lab - The UCSC Wiki Lab

Welcome to the UCSC Wiki Lab ! Our main project consists in studying author repuation and text trust on the Wikipedia.

In the demo, the text background of Wikipedia articles is colored according to its trust. This is a new demo, consisting of all Wikipedia pages as of February 6, 2007, the last complete snapshot we have.

For the status of the demo, see the WikiTrust Blog. The code of WikiTrust is available! We have a WikiTrust discussion group where you can give us suggestions or feedback; we also post to that group important announcements.

How is the trust computed?

The trust of text is computed in two steps:

First, we compute the reputation of each author by analyzing the author's contributions. When an author makes a contribution that is preserved in subsequent edits, the author gains reputation. When an author makes a contribution that is undone or reverted quickly, the author loses reputation.
The trust value of a new word is proportional to the reputation of its author. When subsequent authors edit the page, words that are left unchanged gain trust: by leaving them there, the authors implicitly agree with them. Words closer to the edit gain more trust, as the author of the edit is likely to have paid more attention to them. In contrast, text that has been rearranged (new text, text at the border of cut-and-paste, etc) has again a reputation proportional to the author of the edit.

The details of this procedure are described in the papers and talks mentioned below. The code of WikiTrust is available!

For further reading

Talks

How (much) to trust Wikipedia? YouTube video of a talk given at CITRIS on February 20, 2008. Here are the slides of the talk.
Content-Driven Author Reputation and Text Trust for the Wikipedia, L. de Alfaro, B.T. Adler, I. Pye, C. Sadowski. Talk given at Wikimania, Taiwan, August 2007.

Papers

Robust Content-Driven Reputation, K. Chatterjee, L. de Alfaro, I. Pye. Technical Report UCSC-SOE-08-09, School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA. May 2008.
Assigning Trust To Wikipedia Content, B.T. Adler, K. Chatterjee, L. de Alfaro, M. Faella, I. Pye, V. Raman. Technical Report UCSC-SOE-08-06, School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA. May 2008.
Measuring Author Contributions to Wikipedia, B.T. Adler, L. de Alfaro, I. Pye, V. Raman. Technical Report UCSC-SOE-08-08, School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA. May 2008.
A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia, B.T. Adler and L. de Alfaro, in WWW 2007, Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference, ACM Press, 2007.

People

Luca de Alfaro, B. Thomas Adler, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Ian Pye, Vishwanath Raman, Marco Faella

Feedback, Blog, News

For general topics and discussion of Wikipedia Quality, please join the WikiQuality mailing list. Many Wikipedia people subscribe to this.
For discussion of technical issues with the demo (pages that seem to be improperly colored, code issues, etc) you can join and post to the WikiTrust mailing list. The list is read mostly by wikitrust developers.
For bug reports, use the wikitrust issue tracker.
Curious about the news? Read the WikiTrust Blog!

Press Coverage

This research has been covered by many news sources, including CNN, The Associated Press, USA Today, The New Scientist, Der Spiegel (Germany), Slashdot, Il Sole 24 Ore (Italy), The Washington Post, The Times (of London), Boing Boing, and more. Here is a nice press release from UCSC.

Related Work

This work is part of the Quality Initiative sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The papers on the reputation and trust systems contain references to relatd work on the topic. We have also gathered some related work that is not easily available from other sources.

Support

We gratefully acknowledge the support received from:

CITRIS: Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, a University of California research center.
Institute for Scalable Scientific Data Management, an educational collaboration between LANL and the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).