Taking your word

When RMM asked me to name the research project I’d do during my internship, the challenge was picking an area specific enough to keep me from going tangent-crazy. Those of you who’ve read my uber-long posts before will know what I mean.

Being the wishy-washy arts student I am, the coverage surrounding the Wikitrust project was too good to resist, since WikiTrust or something like it may be the next evolution stage of Wikipedia. As such, the project, which proposes to crowdsource a “trustworthiness” rating for information on Wikipedia, may well be part of yet another unprecedented historical moment: the total reorganisation of information along social lines in less than a generation.

In today’s post I’m going to introduce Wikitrust and talk about why I think that Wiki development is a significant Social Media issue. My second post will mostly focus on how WikiTrust will work, how it proposes to crowdsource trust, and the last post will deal with what Crowd Trust will imply for the social future.

Over the last couple of weeks there’s been a steady drip of comment over the announcement that the WikiTrust project has been approved for a trial rollout as a extension to Wikimedia.

In WikiTrust the reliability of every individual word in the encyclopaedia is highlighted in colour code, from orange (untrustworthy) to white (trustworthy). The original reputation of a word is calculated from the reputation of the author who wrote it, and it then changes when others edit the page. If subsequent editors alter the contribution then it gains positive reputation, and so does the author. If the edit is reverted to an earlier version or deleted, the author loses reputation.

WikiTrust is a very Wikipedian solution to the issue of the reliability of Wikipedia: it aims to crowdsource reliable truth through passive measurement, not through one editor’s ability to browbeat another or revert more times.

Now you might rightly point out that this isn’t exactly a Social Media issue. But I believe the WikiTrust experiment has implications for a coming future in which the “social web” means the whole web. If how you view information is colour-coded according to reliability, then it has profound implications for how we communicate with one another. Even more, it assumes that the reliability of information is essentially a social value, determined by how people use it.

Put simply, WikiTrust tries to build a consensus on what is true. Now if that sounds terrifying, fair enough. But it’s also worth pointing out that from a certain point of view even rigorous academic research is a process of building consensus on who gets to define what is true.

I know, I know. A lot of [citation needed]. And if this all sounds frustratingly even-handed and inconclusive, it’s because that’s how you get to the truth: by arguing about it. The best Wikipedia pages are always the product of compromise: how much or how little is useful; what counts as ‘notable’; whether Han shot first.

The idea behind WikiTrust is to assess Reasonable Doubt for every word we read. If you had the choice, would you want to see the world that way? When was the last time you read something online that you knew for a fact wasn’t true? Did you do anything about it?

The next post will focus on  WikiTrust’s algorithm for trustworthiness, and whether it can ever substitute for gut instinct.