Wikipedia’s Color Coding to Call Out Dubious Text
By Jared Newman
Wikipedia is testing a kind of reputation system that color codes authors’ entries based on their past reliability. Come this fall, users will be able to view pages with shades of orange-highlighted text, denoting the trustworthiness of the person who wrote it. The deeper orange the text’s background, the sketchier the information may be. WikiLab, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been working on this “WikiTrust” technology since 2007, and is finally preparing to roll it out to the world. Reliability is generally determined by how long previous entries stay on the site, so color-coding, like Wikipedia itself, is based more on consensus than truth. If you don’t like how that sounds, don’t fret: WikiTrust will be disabled by default, so this color-coding experiment won’t have any unwilling participants. [via Wired]
