WikiTrust implements an author reputation system, and a text trust system. Content-driven reputation for wiki authorsThe goals of the reputation system are two:
Text trustThe trust of a portion of text is computed according to the reputation of the author, and the reputation of the people who subsequently revised the portion of text, and the text immediately surrounding it. Thus, what WikiTrust calls "text trust" is an indication of the degree with which the text has been revised. The trust is computed in such a way that every text change -- insertions, deletions, displacements -- leaves a low-trust mark, which alerts visitors to the modification. It is possible to compute text trust also based on a mix of text age, and number of revisions for which the text has been present; in fact, it is straightforward to modify WikiTrust to do so. The reason WikiTrust uses also the reputation of authors is to prevent a well-organized set of new users from cheating the system, creating content that gains full trust due to their coordinated revisions. Since new users have low reputation, this type of attack cannot be carried out.ReferencesThe algorithms underlying WikiTrust are described in various papers. |