Tag Archives: WikiTrust

‘Useless Content’ – Part 1

‘Wikipedia is not a valid source’. That’s a common critique on the online encyclopedia. Erin Harty from the University of Idaho stresses that the information on Wikipedia doesn’t have any academic background and that it ‘is not really an encyclopedia but an online magazine written by volunteers who do not need to have any specialized knowledge on anything at all’.

Wikipedia assignment: Is ‘WikiTrust’ the next step towards a more reliable online-encyclopaedia?

Once again the online-encyclopaedia Wikipedia is in the spotlight of attention; after years of various forms of praise, critique and academic studies – in which several different and overlapping aspects of Wikipedia have been discussed – the encyclopaedia has decided once again it wants to increase its authority on the internet. This should be achieved (somewhere this fall [1]) by enhancing Wikipedia’s reliability through the use of coloured text; this technique, called WikiTrust, is a project of professor Luca de Alfaro [2] from the University of California, Santa Cruz, which “is part of ongoing work [..] on reputation systems, online collaboration, and information trust.” The name ‘WikiTrust’ can be a little misleading though, since it has no way of telling how trustworthy texts really are. “‘It can only measure user agreement,’ said de Alfaro. ‘That’s what it does [2].’”

White lies and orange experts: WikiTrust

For a long time, online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized for not being a fully reliable source; anyone is able to edit the encyclopedia anonymously, dis- and misinformation can be posted and might even persist. There is no consistent given indication of reliability. However, starting this fall, the ‘WikiTrust’ feature could have a great impact on…