Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-08-31/In the news

The article states:


 * The extension works by determining the origin of each segment of text within an article and calculating a trust value based on the reputation of the editor who added it and the reputations of editors who subsequently edited the article without removing the text. Authors' reputations are based on how much stable content they have added and how rarely their contributions are reverted. The extension is deployed on the WikiTrust wiki; the trust features are accessible through the "check text" tab. The WikiTrust team has also developed an experimental Firefox add-on that adds a trust tab at the top of article pages.

This bot might be of aid, also, for those Wikipedians who are interested in uncovering instances where editors, who edit an article for reasons like unto why mountain climbers climbs a mountain -- because it's there -- have replaced earlier, better edits from editors who may no longer be contributing.

The bot, however, would hardly be able to solve the overall danger: That should the pool of Wikipedia editors become dumbed-down, that the entire project will become dumbed-down. There probably is no solution to that.

Meanwhile, musing on trust versus "truth":

Of course, the main danger with this kind of thing is that "authors' reputations" and "trust" among fellow Wikipedians -- in the minds of the encyclopedia's users and others -- will become synonymous with factual accuracy and NPOV. Hopefully the former criteria coincide with the latter criteria far more often than they do not.

They had better coincide a lot, IMHCO, if this bot is going to do more than introduce confusion and even more discord. ô ¿ ô 17:26, 3 September 2009 (UTC)