Posted on Tuesday, September 01 2009 @ 16:17 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Wikipedia is considering to implement a new extension named WikiTrust to boost the credibility of its online encyclopedia, this opt-in tool for registered users would implement a colour coding scheme to highlight unreliable information.
The software, WikiTrust, is available as an extension to the MediaWiki platform, upon which Wikipedia runs. It's a project developed by UC Santa Cruz professor Luca de Alfaro, and computer science grad students B. Thomas Adler and Ian Pye.
Reached in Buenos Aires, where Wikimania 2009 has just wrapped up, de Alfaro says that the timing of an experimental trial remains under discussion. The purpose of the trial, he says, will be to gather community feedback about the utility of the tool.
Despite its name, WikiTrust can't directly measure whether text is trustworthy. "It can only measure user agreement," said de Alfaro. "That's what it does."
