Researchers at the UCSC Wiki Lab have come up with a new extension that will help users navigate between reliable and less reliable information found at the website.
Millions of people look up information on Wikipedia every day. Millions more take what they find there with a grain of salt, knowing that the collaborative encyclopedia cannot always be trusted with the facts. Despite numerous measures by the Wikimedia Foundation to enhance reliability, there is always a vandal lurking somewhere, ready to announce that a celebrity has died or that so-and-so committed such-and-such a crime. As George Santayana once said: “History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”
While that may explain the Wikipedia phenomenon, researchers at the UCSC Wiki Lab have come up with a new extension that will help users navigate between reliable and less reliable information found at the website. The new extension, called WikiTrust, is a color-coded system that will enable users to gauge the reliability of content, based on its author and origin. When applying the extension, new content will be highlighted in various shades of orange, depending on how trusted the user is. The orange will fade gradually as the new text remains on the site without being reverted by one of the volunteer editors.
Of course, that may work better in more frequently visited articles like Barack Obama or the Beatles. The question remains what will happen to the more arcane articles, such as the Santa Cruz Symphony article. UCSC took a step in the right direction by developing the new extension, but there is still plenty of work to be done. Read More at WebProNews.
