Wikipedia co-founder to test quality-control idea

A way to ensure better quality control on Wikipedia entries by color-coding edits to red-flag potentially dubious content will be tested on some smaller sites in the Wikia Inc. community to determine its effectiveness, the co-founder of Wikipedia said Sunday.

The color coding idea comes from Luca de Alfaro, an associate professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, and is aimed at erasing doubts about the reliability of entries on Wikipedia by its all-volunteer team.

It's a huge task. The program will analyze Wikipedia's entire editing history, 2 million pages and more than 40 million edits on the English-language site alone, and each contributor will be ranked for reliability. Wikipedia entries that stand the test of time, without revision, will improve the reputation of a contributor. Contributors with a history of postings that require corrections are flagged as untrustworthy. The program calculates the reputation by working from a contributor's history of edits.

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A way to ensure better quality control on Wikipedia entries by color-coding edits to red-flag potentially dubious content will be tested on some smaller sites in the Wikia Inc. community to determine its effectiveness, the co-founder of Wikipedia said Sunday.

The color coding idea comes from Luca de Alfaro, an associate professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, and is aimed at erasing doubts about the reliability of entries on Wikipedia by its all-volunteer team.

It's a huge task. The program will analyze Wikipedia's entire editing history, 2 million pages and more than 40 million edits on the English-language site alone, and each contributor will be ranked for reliability. Wikipedia entries that stand the test of time, without revision, will improve the reputation of a contributor. Contributors with a history of postings that require corrections are flagged as untrustworthy. The program calculates the reputation by working from a contributor's history of edits.

The co-founder of Wikipedia said it was one of the most exciting ideas he'd heard at Wikimania 2007 in Taipei.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.