Soon you will be able to see at a glance what text on Wikipedia is trustworthy simply by what color it is highlighted in.

While Wikipedia has been an amazing resource for information on just about anything you can think of, one of the biggest problems for the monolithic project has been just how trustworthy any given entry really is.  Well, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit group that backs the site, is hoping to alleviate some of your worries this fall with a new addition that will color code text by how trustworthy it is.

According to Wired there has been an extension available for MediaWiki, the software Wikipedia runs on, since November 2008 called “WikiTrust”.  The extension is freely available to anyone who runs a MediaWiki install, and its job is to color code text based on the authority level of the author, and how long the text stays on the page.  Text from questionable sources will start out with a bright orange background, but text entered by trusted authors will receive a lighter color.  As more people view the text, and leave it as is, the text will gain more “trust” and slowly turn from orange to white.

The new system will be able to be turned off and on by users that are viewing a given page so that you can see the text in the normal format.  If you read through an article though, and something doesn’t feel quite right, you will be able to turn on the color coding and see if you were correct about something not ringing quite true with you.

This really should be a welcome addition to the online encyclopedia as trust has been one of the biggest issues for the project.  While the ability for anyone to edit the site has been what has allowed the project to grow in size by leaps and bounds, it has also made it prone to malicious editors changing entries to fit their personal views.

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Entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 3:50 pm under Technology.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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