UCSC WikiLab Wiki
August 20, 2009
WikiTrust v3.0.pre1 has been released. This is a major upgrade!
Easier installation process. WikiTrust now installs directly under the mediawiki/extensions directory, like all other extensions.
- More accurate author, origin information.
- The trust coloring is better suited to small, growing wikis.
- The batch mode is now suitable for the analysis of wikis as large as the English Wikipedia (if you have the storage for this!).
There are also many other improvements and refinements -- it is really a whole new version.
November 5, 2008
WikiTrust v2.11 has been released. The main new features are:
Author tracking is now implemented! In the check text tab, when the mouse hovers over a word, a pop-up displays the name of the user who inserted the word.
- We fixed a bug affecting how multiple votes for the same revision interact.
In summary, this is the information now available from the check text tab:
- Information trust is displayed via background coloring.
- Text authors are displayed via pop-ups when the mouse pointer hovers over the words.
- Text origin can be explored by clicking on words: clicking on a word redirects to the diff showing the edit where the word was inserted.
As we added author tracking, it is necessary to recompute the information you have in the database. If your database is up to date to the v2.10 version, all you need to do is:
./eval_online_wiki -delete_all -db_user <database_username> -db_pass <database_password> -db_name <database_name> -log_file /dev/null -n_events 1000000
Where common defaults for the values are:
database_username: wikiuser
database_name: wikidb
October 28, 2008
WikiTrust v2.10 has been released.
The main novelty is that it is now possible to vote for the trust of information. If you agree with the text of an article, and wish to raise its trust, you can now click on a vote button present in the check text tab. You do not need to edit the text to raise its trust! Special algorithms ensure that you cannot vote multiple times on the same piece of text, increasing its trust more than once. The algorithms make such multiple-voting attacks impossible even with the help of fake identities (as in Sybil attacks, also known as sock-puppet attacks).
Other novelties are:
WikiTrust provides much better information about the trust of text in young wikis: we have tuned the reputation and trust dynamics so that the process adapts dynamically to the wiki size.
The WikiTrust tables now can live in a separate database from the main mediawiki tables.
- Some bugs removed.
- Many performance improvements.
September 1, 2008
WikiTrust v2.04 has been released. Changes include:
- The database for the trust information is now InnoDB, and some issues related to possible deadlocks that were present in the code using MyISAM have been resolved.
- The name of the trust tab is now configurable.
- The efficiency of the code has been improved.
- It is now possible to "throttle down" the computation to avoid overloading a busy database server.
August 23, 2008
WikiTrust v2.03 has been released. Changes include:
The blame map now works. When you look at the trust information, if you click on any word, you are sent to the diff illustrating the edit where the word was first introduced in that context in the article.
- Improved the documentation and utilities to load .xml dump files in wikis.
Improved the documentation on how to use WikiTrust to recompute a trust coloring from scratch.
- Fixed a bug related to the display of trust information in nested bullet + enumeration lists.
August 20, 2008
WikiTrust v2.01 has been released. This version is much easier to install than the previous version, as no skins are necessary. However, the trust information of the wiki should be recomputed, since we changed the format of the tags that convey the trust information.
Coming soon: we will soon release a version of WikiTrust which implements the so-called blame-maps: if you click on a word, you will be led to the edit where the word was introduced.
Looking for contributors and package maintainers. Anyone would like to help and produce .rpm and .deb for our tool, so that it can be more easily installed? We would very much welcome this!
August 18, 2008
New! WikiTrust v2.0 released! You can analyze your wikis for trust in real-time! We released WikiTrust v2.0. WikiTrust is now able to analyze any wiki served by MediaWiki in real-time, as edits are made! You can install WikiTrust as a MediaWiki extension, and have all visitors to your wiki see a new trust tab which provides them with the trust information. The extension can be deployed both on brand-new wikis, and on existing ones; in the latter case, WikiTrust will first analyze existing content, and then it will process any edits in real-time, as the users enter them. See WikiTrust for more details.
June 5, 2008
I'm working on a page explaining how to Extend the Code Base for other analysis of Wiki dumps. --Ian
May 28, 2008
combinestatfiles.ml has been fixed (for some reason, it was not working right). You can find the fix in the unstable branch of git (we will move the fix to the stable branch in a little while). As a side note, development is proceeding fast these days, so you may want to make the "unstable" branch your main one. --Luca
May 23, 2008
We have a major new release of wikitrust out. The release does not contain yet on-line evaluation code: we are still working on that. However, the release contains the following improvements:
The reputation and trust algorithms have been made resistant to many form of Sybil attack. See the publications listed on UCSC Wiki Lab for further information.
Files now keep track automatically of the command line arguments, code version, and input data, used to produce them. For each file.ext generated, the tool now also writes a f ile file.ext.info.xml containing in xml detailed information on the software version, data, and command lines used to compute file.ext . No more loose data files nobody remembers how they were produced!
- Many small improvements and bug-fixes.
We are going to further test this revision over memorial weekend. Oh, important: to use it, you need an updated copy of OcamlLdaLibs as well! --Luca
Apr 30, 2008
We released a new version of the code that fixes a bug in the way reputation was computed on the basis of edit analysis. This upgrade is recommended for everybody. The bug did not affect our published results, as those were obtained before the bug was introduced.
We are working on the implementation of an on-line system for author reputation and text trust for wikis. The code will be able to color new article revisions according to trust in real-time, as the revisions are created by users. There is already some prototype code in an online directory, but that code does not work as of now. The code is still in development. The only code that works so far is the one for the batch system. --Luca
Feb 18, 2008
We have released the code! Most of the code is covered by the BSD license, with some Mediawiki plugins being GPL. We are currently developing an on-line version of the code, that can compute author reputation and text trust in real time, as edits are made. --Luca
Jan 10, 2008
We have solved our performance issues! For those of you who could not get the demo to load in the past, please try again now. --Ian
Jan 9, 2008
The server is up again. --Luca
Jan 8, 2008
Power to the campus is up again, but the server has not come up properly. We will investigate. --Luca
Jan 6, 2008
The demo is down, as is the main School of Engineering web site. We have had problems due to storms, and due to electrical power delivery to the campus, so we had to shut down most computers in the machine rooms. --Luca
Dec 18, 2007
The demo is back up! Many thanks to Heidi Sitton! The demo will be occasionally unavailable in the coming days, as work on electrical power lines on campus progresses, but hopefully the outages will be of short duration. --Luca
Dec 18, 2007
Unfortunately, the server we are using for the demo did not come up properly. We are investigating the problem, and we are unsure when the demo will be back up. --Luca
Dec 17, 2007
Most of the campus lost power, and the server hosting the demo did not come up after the black-out. Hopefully, the database has not been corrupted by the outage, and the server has not been damaged. We hope the demo will be back up soon. --Luca
Dec 13, 2007
The new demo is up! The demo consists of all the pages of the Wikipedia, as of the February 6, 2007 snapshot, the last complete snapshot we have. The next thing to do is to release the code. It should be done in a few hours. --Luca
Dec 13, 2007
Due to problems on one of the servers, we had to move this wiki to another server, and for a while, the URL http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/ was not working. Our apologies! --Luca
Dec 12, 2007
All that separates us from the release of the code and the demo is a few symbolic links. Tomorrow is the day! --Luca