How (Much) to Trust Wikipedia

Luca de Alfaro, Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz gave a talk at CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) at the University of California, Berkeley yesterday regarding a system for trusting Wikipedia text based on author reputation. The trust system derives from the fact that as a collaborative encylopedia, anyone can contribute to a wikipedia and readers have no of knowing whether to trust the contributed content.

The trust system can be visualized via a coloring of the text background, effectively spotting attempts to tamper with Wikipedia information. The entire English Wikipedia can be browsed using this sytem at http://trust/cse/ucsc/edu.