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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.'"
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.