Sunday, September 6, 2009

Adding Trust to Wikipedia, And Beyond

Color me trustworthy: WikiTrust codes Wikipedia pages according to contributors' reputations and how the content has changed over time. Credit: University of California, Santa Cruz

From Technology Review:

Tracing information back to its source could help prove trustworthiness.

The official motto of the Internet could be "don't believe everything you read," but moves are afoot to help users know better what to be skeptical about and what to trust.

A tool called WikiTrust, which helps users evaluate information on Wikipedia by automatically assigning a reliability color-coding to text, came into the spotlight this week with news that it could be added as an option for general users of Wikipedia. Also, last week the Wikimedia Foundation announced that changes made to pages about living people will soon need to be vetted by an established editor. These moves reflect a broader drive to make online information more accountable. And this week the World Wide Web Consortium published a framework that could help any Web site make verifiable claims about authorship and reliability of content.

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