WikiTrust was a

software product Software consists of computer programs that instruct the execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital computers in the mid-20th cen ...

, available as a Firefox Plugin, which aimed to assist editors in detecting vandalism and dubious edits by highlighting the "untrustworthy" text with a yellow or orange background. As of September 2017, the server is offline, but the code is still available for download. When the UCSC server was active, WikiTrust assessed the credibility of content and author reputation of

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

articles using an automated

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

. WikiTrust provides a

plug-in Plug-in, plug in or plugin may refer to: * Plug-in (computing), a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program ** Audio plug-in, adds audio signal processing features ** Photoshop plugin, a piece of software that ...

for servers using the

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

platform, such as

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

. When installed, it was designed to enable users of that website to obtain information about the author, origin, and reliability of that website's wiki text. Content that is stable, based on an analysis of article history, should be displayed in normal black-on-white type, and content that is not stable is highlighted in varying shades of yellow or orange. It was formerly available for several language versions of Wikipedia. WikiTrust on Wikipedia was undertaken by the Online Collaboration Lab at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

, in response to a

Meta-wiki The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, the eighth most visited website ...

quality initiative sponsored by the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...

.Main Page
from the UCSC Online Collaboration Lab The project, discussed at

Wikimania 2009 Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, f ...

, was one of a number of quality/rating tools for Wikipedia content that the Wikimedia Foundation was considering.

Communications of the ACM ''Communications of the ACM'' (''CACM'') is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). History It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are i ...

(August 2011) had an article on it. WikiTrust is designed for English and German use via the Wiki-Watch pagedetails for Wikipedia articles, in several languages via a

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

plugin or it can be installed in any MediaWiki configuration. By 2012, WikiTrust appeared to be inactive.

Software application

Computing reliability

WikiTrust computes, for each word, three pieces of information: * The author of the word. * The revision where the word (and the immediately surrounding text) was inserted. By clicking on a word, visitors are sent to the revision where the word originated. * The "trust" of the word, indicated by the word background coloring (orange for "untrusted" text, white for "trusted" text). The trust of the word is computed according to how much the word, and the surrounding text, have been revised by users that WikiTrust considers of "high authority."''See'' This project is still in a beta test stage.

Criticism

The criticism has been raised that "the software doesn’t really measure trustworthiness, and the danger is that people will trust the software to measure something that it does not." Generally, users whose content persists for a long time without being "reverted" by other editors are deemed more trustworthy by the software. This may mean that users who edit controversial articles subject to frequent reversion may be found to be less trustworthy than others. The software uses a variation of

Levenshtein distance In information theory, linguistics, and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. The Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (i ...

to measure how much of user's edit is kept or rearranged, so that users can receive "partial credit" for their work.B. Adler and L. de Alfaro. A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia. ''In'' WWW 2007, Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference, ACM Press, 2007.

Community bias

The software has also been described as measuring the amount of consensus in an article.Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text
an August 30, 2009 article from ''

Wired News ''Wired'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in publication since its l ...

'' The community of editors collaborate on articles and revise each other until agreement is reached. Users who make edits which are more similar to the final agreement will receive more reputation. The point is also made that consensus revolves around the beliefs of the community, so that the reputation computed is also a reflection of the community.

References

External links