Over at Technology Review there’s an article about another effort to build trust around information found on Internet Web Sites.
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.
Where are they getting their trust levels from?
WikiTrust, developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, color-codes the information on a Wikipedia page using algorithms that evaluate the reliability of the author and the information itself. The algorithms do this by examining how well-received the author’s contributions have been within the community. It looks at how quickly a user’s edits are revised or reverted and considers the reputation of those people who interact with the author. If a disreputable editor changes something, the original author won’t necessarily lose many reputation points.
The community determines truth. When you abandon God, the community is really the only source of truth you have.
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