Wikipedia Colour Codes Content To Gauge Trustworthiness

by Yuliya Talmazan | August 31, 2009 at 09:16 am

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To help users navigate through its sea of content, Wikipedia is introducing new functionality called WikiTrust. Now, questionable content will be possible to spot visually. Two criteria will define the trustworthiness of the content posted:

1. the authority/ reputation of the contributor based on previous history of contributions (score 0-9)
2. the length of time that content has been out there on the site

The content that is not highly trustable will be highlighted in bright orange, while content that has been out on the site for a while and comes from "experts" in the field will be shaded lighter orange. The most trustworthy content will be labeled white. The option will only be available with the English version of Wikipedia. The tab for the WikiTrust option will be located right next to "edit this page" and "history" tabs.

An optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

Called WikiTrust, the program assigns a color code to newly edited text using an algorithm that calculates author reputation from the lifespan of their past contributions. It’s based on a simple concept: The longer information persists on the page, the more accurate it’s likely to be.

The use of colour coding to ease the perception of the trustworthiness of the text sounds like a cool idea, but immediately there seem to be potential issues with the algorithm used to accomplish that. What if in any particular niche area of knowledge, there are a couple of experts whose authority is extremely high, and for some reason they post a false fact on Wikipedia? Will there be anyone to prove them wrong and edit content? If not, the content will lie still unedited and gain in rating. Wikipedia says WikiTrust "measures consensus" based on how many members agree with the author of the post, but what if there is no dialogue because the topic is way too specific? It seems the algorithm will have to accommodate many compromises, but Wikipedia's attempt to deal with questionable content rather than hide their head in the sand is definitely a step forward.

Starting sometime this fall, registered Wikipedia users will be able to click on a “trust info” tab and view the color-coded text.

Now, I only wish there was the same trust-measuring functionality everywhere on the Web.

It sounds like perhaps Wikipedia has been taken over by DailyKos and its CIA-trained owner. At Wikipedia, it is not possible to link to and cite blogs, even though blogs often discover and disseminate key information before the mainstream media does.

When the mainstream media is the arbitor of what is true and what isn't, it basically creates a corporate truth that is sometimes opposed to an actual truth.

At least the reliance on specific measures of reliability based on the reputation of news sources can be objectively applied. However, the reliance on "reputation" allows a majority to create a "truth" simply by being in the majority, while suppressing other truths that individuals have carefully documented over a period of time.

Here is an example: On June 2, 2006, Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga ("Kos" of DailyKos) acknowledged in an audiotaped speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that he had spent two years training with the Central Intelligence Agency during the period when he was starting his "leftist", "liberal", "progressive blog. A biography of a public figure that leaves out a two year stint of training and who knows what else at the CIA is missing crucial information. It's basically worthless and deceptive when it leaves out information that is so easily found on Google. It makes all of the information at Wikipedia seem dubious and potentially distorted.

Even though I have gone to Wikipedia several times to insert a link to this audiotape, I constantly find that the link has been removed. And so censorship by someone, perhaps a majority and perhaps a minority, is crafting and sculpting a version of the truth about a public figure that leaves out key information about that figure that he, himself, has acknowledged.

Should a biography of George W. Bush mention the Iraq War, even though it embarrasses the ex-president? I think it should, but not everyone will agree with me.

Wikipedia is unreliable not because it is not written by professionals, but rather because professionals are professionally manipulating the content there.

Dude - as all the history of the article is freely available for anyone to see, including who deleted what, and the allegation (as you acknowledge) is available elsewhere on the internet then it wouldn't be a very effective form of censorship.

I'm almost totally ignorant of the background of this story, but a search reveals that much of what exists around this story is namechecking between any number of obviously partisan blogs.

But, if I wanted to get this story linked to from Wikipedia, I'd probably get a transcript of the audio as well as the audio itself. I could claim that "Moulitsas claimed to have walked on the moon" and linked to the audio file... but no-one would be bothered listening to the full hour to find if that was true: they'd just delete it.

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