WikiTrust – The Reason Why You Can Now Trust Wikipedia

Posted on 01 September 2009

wiki
One of the reasons why people do not rely on Wikipedia is because it can be edited by users and thus, its content cannot be really trusted especially if you need authoritative information. But Wikipedia aimed to change that by launching WikiTrust – a feature that will guide you which content to trust and which to ignore.

Basically, WikiTrust will color code the texts based on the author’s past contributions and how long the text stays on the page. If the text is questionable, it will be highlighted in orange. As people reedit it, it will gain more trust and slowly turn into white.

This trust has a score and it ranges from 0-9. If an author with less authority writes a block of text, it will be orange but if a person with more authority edits it and approves it, it will be colored based on the person who edited it. Of course, the person with more trust prevails.

But the problem I see in here is that the age of the editor is used as a sole factor. What if that author does not have the authority in that particular topic but has authority in Wikipedia from being an old editor. This is a gap that I saw.

But in the end, we have to commend Wikipedia for trying its best to increase its reliability.

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This post was written by:

Aira Bongco - who has written 21 posts on Aira Bongco.

Aira Bongco is a social media analyst. She loves to study social media culture and audiences. With this, she is also interested in search engine optimization and internet marketing

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One Response to “WikiTrust – The Reason Why You Can Now Trust Wikipedia”

  1. jojit aero says:

    This is good news actually. Recently I tried to edit some contents, and I was censured. I suppose the policy to ensure reliability is really improving. With the millions of articles Wiki currently has, and given its reach, Wiki really has to make great efforts, so as not to put everything into waste. Thanks Aira! More posts like this!


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