Filed under: Web services
Wikipedia to color-code unreliable information
Wikipedia recently announced plans for a new feature that will color-code every word of every entry according to its reliability. Go ahead and make the obvious joke ("Aren't they all unreliable?" Ha. Ha.), but the way they're going about it actually sounds pretty smart. The optional color-coding feature is called "WikiTrust," and it codes each word according to how long it's been on the page and how reputable its author is. The main worry when someone talks about reliability, or Wikipedia in general, is a serious lack of objectivity. Some controversial pages become battlegrounds that are changed back and forth daily, and all of those changes are (rightly, I think) going to hurt the pages' perceived credibility under WikiTrust. New text will start out with a bright orange background that fades gradually to white if it survives without editing for a while.
The only place I can see the system failing is in cases of vandalism. When a prankster seeds a page with fake information, it'll be new and labeled untrustworthy. That's good. When the correction suffers the same fate? Well, that might be bad. The saving grace is that a reliable registered user's changes start out with a lighter shade of orange than an anonymous vandal's, so they're not actually treated the same way.
[via Lifehacker]
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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John Laur said 5:52PM on 9-02-2009
In the case of vandalism or other edits with malintent, the corrective action is generally not to come back in replace text over the vandalism, but to revert the offending change such that the original text is restored with its original authors and original ages intact.
There was a project some time ago that implemented this idea via a wikipedia proxy simply by age of the edit and the results were indeed very good.
I don't, however, believe that an author's history or trust should be weighted very heavily in the eventual trust score. (What about a compromised account?) Rather I think peer review of edits should be the primary method of increasing the trust of each edit. A users history might increase his weight as a reviewer but should not affect the trust of directly posted material.
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Matt said 5:33PM on 9-02-2009
I'm pretty sure that in case of vandalism the page would just be reverted, which means old WikiTrust colors would return too. At least that sounds like a good way to handle that.
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Jay Pleas said 11:23PM on 9-02-2009
I admit, I was one of those skeptics of Wikipedia because of the information given. However, I might have to rethink on using if they use this route in determining the age of the print on each wiki. I knew they could come up with a solution, and hopefully they will improve on the matter further more in the future.
Jay Pleas,
http://www.workathometomakemoney.com/
http://www.jermainelovepoems.com/
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