Posted 09/01/09 at 04:15:31 PM by Paul Lilly

Researchers from the Wiki Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz have devised a new way to help readers sift through Wikipedia's 12 million articles and separate potential fact from fiction. The optional feature is called WikiTrust, and when enabled, every word of the online encyclopedia will be color coded based on the reliability of its author and length of time the content has remained on the page.

"They've hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia," said Wikipedia software developer and neuroscientist Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology. "Everyone's injecting random crap into Wikipedia, and what people agree with more often sticks around. Crap that people don't like goes away."

The way it works is text from an unproven source starts out with a bright orange background. Over time, as more people edit and view the new text, it will slowly gain more "trust" and start to turn white. Text from trusted authors will start off with a lighter shade. But not everyone is on board with what Wiki Lab is working on.

"This isn't a trivial web architecture design and implementation issue," said computer scientist Ed Chi of the Palo Alto Research Group, who studies Wikipedia and social cognition. 

Chi is in part referring to the processing power and additional disk space required to implment a real-time reputation score to every word in an article.

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