A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia

A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2007, written by B. Thomas Adler and Luca de Alfaro.

Overview

Authors present a content-driven reputation system for Wikipedia authors. In system, authors gain reputation when the edits they perform to Wikipedia articles are preserved by subsequent authors, and they lose reputation when their edits are rolled back or undone in short order. Thus, author reputation is computed solely on the basis of content evolution; user-to-user comments or ratings are not used. The author reputation authors compute could be used to flag new contributions from low-reputation authors, or it could be used to allow only authors with high reputation to contribute to controversialor critical pages. A reputation system for the Wikipedia could also provide an incentive for high-quality contributions. Authors have implemented the proposed system, and authors have used it to analyze the entire Italian and French Wikipedias, consisting of a total of 691, 551 pages and 5, 587, 523 revisions. Authors results show that notion of reputation has good predictive value: changes performed by low-reputation authors have a significantly larger than average probability of having poor quality, as judged by human observers, and of being later undone, as measured by algorithms.