research-article

Assigning trust to Wikipedia content

Authors:

B. Thomas Adler,

Krishnendu Chatterjee,

Luca de Alfaro,

Vishwanath RamanAuthors Info & Claims

WikiSym '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis

Article No.: 26, Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/1822258.1822293

Published: 08 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia: anyone can contribute to its articles simply by clicking on an "edit" button. The open nature of the Wikipedia has been key to its success, but has also created a challenge: how can readers develop an informed opinion on its reliability? We propose a system that computes quantitative values of trust for the text in Wikipedia articles; these trust values provide an indication of text reliability.

The system uses as input the revision history of each article, as well as information about the reputation of the contributing authors, as provided by a reputation system. The trust of a word in an article is computed on the basis of the reputation of the original author of the word, as well as the reputation of all authors who edited text near the word. The algorithm computes word trust values that vary smoothly across the text; the trust values can be visualized using varying text-background colors. The algorithm ensures that all changes to an article's text are reflected in the trust values, preventing surreptitious content changes.

We have implemented the proposed system, and we have used it to compute and display the trust of the text of thousands of articles of the English Wikipedia. To validate our trust-computation algorithms, we show that text labeled as low-trust has a significantly higher probability of being edited in the future than text labeled as high-trust.

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Cited By

Wyrich MBogner JWagner S(2023)40 Years of Designing Code Comprehension Experiments: A Systematic Mapping StudyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362652256:4(1-42)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626522
Moás PLopes C(2023)Automatic Quality Assessment of Wikipedia Articles—A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362528656:4(1-37)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625286
Rigaki MGarcia S(2023)A Survey of Privacy Attacks in Machine LearningACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362401056:4(1-34)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624010
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Index Terms

Assigning trust to Wikipedia content
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms
      1. Computer supported cooperative work
  2. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Interaction paradigms
      1. Web-based interaction
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing and business
      1. Computer supported cooperative work

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

WikiSym '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis

September 2008

219 pages

ISBN:9781605581286

DOI:10.1145/1822258

Conference Chair:
Ademar Aguiar
INESC Porto, FEUP, University of Porto, Portugal
,
Program Chair:
Mark Bernstein
Eastgate Systems

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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University of Porto

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 September 2008

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WikiSym08: 2008 International Symposium on Wikis

September 8 - 10, 2008

Porto, Portugal

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Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 145 submissions, 48%

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626522
Moás PLopes C(2023)Automatic Quality Assessment of Wikipedia Articles—A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362528656:4(1-37)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3625286
Rigaki MGarcia S(2023)A Survey of Privacy Attacks in Machine LearningACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362401056:4(1-34)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624010
Guo YHan QLou YWang YLiu CYuan X(2023)Edit-History Vis: An Interactive Visual Exploration and Analysis on Wikipedia Edit History2023 IEEE 16th Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis)10.1109/PacificVis56936.2023.00025(157-166)Online publication date: Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/PacificVis56936.2023.00025
Hegade PKalburgi D(2023)PD-Box: A People Place Data Box for Processing Engine Anatomy2023 2nd Edition of IEEE Delhi Section Flagship Conference (DELCON)10.1109/DELCON57910.2023.10127379(1-6)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2023
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Rizzo LLongo L(2023)Comparing and extending the use of defeasible argumentation with quantitative data in real-world contextsInformation Fusion10.1016/j.inffus.2022.08.02589(537-566)Online publication date: Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2022.08.025
Kaffee LVougiouklis PSimperl E(2022)Using natural language generation to bootstrap missing Wikipedia articles: A human-centric perspectiveSemantic Web10.3233/SW-21043113:2(163-194)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-210431
Kuznetsov ANovotny MKlein JSaez-Trumper DKittur A(2022)Templates and Trust-o-meters: Towards a widely deployable indicator of trust in WikipediaProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517523(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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Kharrat AHlaoua LBen Romdhane L(2022)Contradiction Detection Approach Based on Semantic Relations and Evidence of UncertaintyComputational Collective Intelligence10.1007/978-3-031-16014-1_19(232-245)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2022
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Abedinzadeh FAmintoosi HAllahbakhsh M(2022)An Iterative Model for Quality Assessment in Collaborative Content Generation SystemsService-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2021 Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-14135-5_10(125-138)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2022
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