Could a Reputation System Improve Wikipedia?

Acidus writes, "There is an excellent article in this month's First Monday about using reputation systems to limit the effects of vandalism on public wikis like Wikipedia. It discusses the benefits and weaknesses of various algorithms to judge how 'reliable' a given piece of text or an edit is. From the article: 'I propose that it would be better to provide Wikipedia users with a visual cue that enables them to see what assertions in an article have, in fact, survived the scrutiny of a large number of people, and what assertions are relatively fresh, and may not be as reliable. This would enable Wikipedia users to take more advantage of the power of the collaborative editing process taking place without forcing that process to change.'"

Comments

One Idea from the artical that was worth while

[AndyG314]

First off, most of this artical was a bad idea. One thing that did seem like a good idea, was to somehow (perhaps by marking in red or some other visual clue) indicate what part of an artical was new, from the part of the artical which has existed for a while. This would help in several ways:
1) People looking for reliable information would know that these parts of an artical have not been exposed to long term scrutney, and therefore may be inacurate.
2) The new, and therefore unverified parts would be more obvious, which would help focus accuracy checking on new material.

It would seem logical for "new" text to remain new, untill it had been viewed a certain number of times, allowing enough sets of eyes to read it, rather than a set time limit, since some articals are not viewed very often, which allows them to remain inaccurate for a long time.

I dunno...

[earthbound kid]

According to some preliminary research by Aaron Swartz about who write Wikipedia, while it's true that most of the editing is done by regulars of the sort who would have karma, most of the original content is added by people with few other contributions to Wikipedia. The regulars just go back and put everything into Wiki format, add tags, make things follow style guides, etc. Since the real work is done by anonymous people who may never come back to the site, it's important to keep the process as open as possible for people who are still new to Wikipedia.

Re:Hardly

[Millenniumman]

The editors have a conservative streak? That is amusing. Or are you forgetting the editors' comments (in the story summaries) about the free market being a failure, fahrenheit 9/11 being very insightful and wishing it would sway voters, and numerous other such comments? Most of /. is very far from conservative.

Reputation Theorist

[Anonymous Coward]

Chris Allen writes pretty regularly on reputation systems (from a game designers point of view usually). I have read through a few academic papers on the topic, and I find the writing at lifewithalacrity to be of unusual breadth, clarity and brevity...

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/

$0.02