• WikiTrust

WikiTrust is a tool for computing author reputation and text trust for the Wikipedia. You can keep up to date with news by visiting the WikiTrust Blog.

Tool Capabilities

WikiTrust implements a reputation system for Wikipedia authors and a trust system for Wikipedia text:

• The reputation of authors is computed from content evolution: authors who provide lasting contributions gain reputation, while authors whose contributions are reverted in short order lose reputation. Thus, the reputation system provides an incentive towards constructive behavior.

• Text trust is computed on the basis of author reputation: the trust of a word is a function of the reputation of its original author, as well as of the reputation of all the authors who have subsequently revised the text where the word appears. Mediawiki plug-ins can display the text trust as coloring of the text background.

The tool also computes the revision where each word was introduced. A Mediawiki plug-in enables a wiki visitor to simply click on a word, and be sent to the revision where it originated.

With relatively minor adaptations, WikiTrust can work on any wiki. The tool is easily extensible: it includes a powerful infrastructure for tracking the history of text across the revisions of a wiki article; on top of this infrastructure, it is easy to build "wiki visitor" algorithms that compute a wide range of statistics. The current version of the tool is suited to the analysis of static wiki dumps only. We are currently developing a version that can assign author reputation and text trust in real-time, as edits are made.

A demo of the tool is available following the link from the UCSC Wiki Lab.

We have a WikiTrust discussion group where you can discuss the tool and its code, and that you can use to give us feedback and suggestions.

Getting the Code

The code of WikiTrust is released as open source. The core of the code is released under the BSD license; some Mediawiki plugins are distributed under the GPL.

We manage the code using Git. To get the code, do:

git clone git://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/share/git/wikitrust.git
git clone git://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/share/git/OcamlLdaLibs.git

Getting Started

To compile the code, you need Ocaml version at least 3.10.0. Proceed as follows:

cd OcamlLdaLibs
make all
make allopt
cd ../wikitrust/batch/analysis
make all
make allopt

This builds the various executables. The make all commands produces code suitable to the Ocaml debugger; the make allopt command builds code that is natively compiled. The latter is very much recommended, as the tool is at least one order of magnitude faster when natively compiled. Instructions on how to use the commands is available in the help file wikitrust/batch/doc/README.

Contributing

Here are detailed instructions on Contributing to WikiTrust, for people who are interested in developing it, or who want to have the very latest releases of the code.

Support

If you are interested in support, you may contact CollaborativeTrust.com