Abstract
The Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia collaboratively edited by Internet users with a minimum of administration. Anybody can write an article for the Wikipedia and there is no verification of the author’s expertise on the particular subject. This may lead to problems relating to the quality of articles, especially completeness and correctness of information, and inaccuracies in the Wikipedia have been rumoured to cause students to fail courses; innocent people have been associated with the killing of John F. Kennedy, etc. Providing a means to assess the correctness, completeness and impartiality of information in the Wikipedia is therefore vitally important for the users to build trust in the Wikipedia and ensure the continued success and growth of the system.
Integrating a reputation system into the Wikipedia would help users assess the quality of articles and provide a powerful incentive for authors to improve the quality of their articles. There are currently more than 7.5 million articles in the Wikipedia, and more than a thousand new articles are added daily, so the investment in the existing system is significant. The introduction of a recommendation system should therefore not require any modifications to the existing Wikipedia software.
In this paper we examine the problem of reengineering a large and popular system, in this case the Wikipedia, in order to include a reputation system. We propose a recommendation system, which allows Wikipedia users to calculate a personalised rating for any article based on feedback (recommendations) provided by other Wikipedia users. The recommendation system developed for the Wikipedia is based on a general architecture, which we believe applies to many existing applications for online collaboration. The proposed recommendation system is implemented in a proxy placed between the user’s web-browser and theWikipedia server, e.g., on the user’s own machine, so there is no need to modify Wikipedia servers or software. A simple prototype of the proposed recommendation system is presented in this paper along with a preliminary evaluation of the prototype.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management (STM 08) |
| Publication date | 2008 |
| Pages | 71-84 |
| Publication status | Published - 2008 |
| Event | 4th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management - Trondheim, Norway Duration: 16 Jun 2008 → 17 Jun 2008 Conference number: 4 |
Workshop
| Workshop | 4th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management |
|---|---|
| Number | 4 |
| Country/Territory | Norway |
| City | Trondheim |
| Period | 16/06/2008 → 17/06/2008 |