Tags

Change Congress

Clinamen

thuswise to swerve

Measuring "trust" in Wikipedia

Submitted by Jim Brown on August 5, 2007 - 1:39pm.

Luca de Alfaro, an associate professor of computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz has developed way to track "trust" in Wikipedia entries. Text that has lasted the longest in Wikipedia entries has a white background and is thus "trusted." Newer text has an orange background and is not (or at least "less") trusted. You can check out some random entries at the UCSC WikiLab.

This is a really interesting project, and it offers us one way to measure accuracy or "trust." Of course, text that has lasted longer is not always necessarily to be trusted, but if we recognize Linus's Law ("given enough eyes all bugs are shallow") then this is could be a really effective way of at least tracing which parts of articles are more stable.

About Me

My name is Jim Brown. I received my Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Digital Literacies and Literatures from the University of Texas. In September 2009, I will join the English Department at Wayne State University as an Assistant Professor. I write for multiple blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings via this RSS feed. Clinamen focuses mostly on my research interests, and its title is explained in this post from January 2008.

Links

Recent comments

Blogroll