Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text | Wired Science | Wired.com

This idea (and the tool for its implementation) has been around for a while. Now it seems that wikipedia is going to implement it. The dominant issue (particularly in academic circles) about wikipedia is that because anyone can contribute it is subject to vanadalism and misinformation. How do you know that what you are reading is credible or fake? My answer has tended to question the nature of any text in the same way. However, other texts tend to use expert consensus through various forms of commercial and credility gatekeeping to keep those questions to a minimum. Although Wikipedia has used editors to monitor and ‘repair’ vandalism/misinformation on its site since it started, it has resisted this type of gate-keeping.

Now it looks like its found a solution: using an algorithm to weed out inaccurate information. The axiom is simple: the longer information persists on the page, the more accurate it’s likely to be. So, wikitrust, the programme that is to be adopted this autumn measures that for every page. Will it work? As an algorithm, of course it will. But it can only ever measure consensus. If a ‘fact’ is agreed with – persists – it will be deemed accurate. On the face of it this looks a little weak. But if you think about it the

majority opinion has nearly always dictated society’s definition of truth. A 15th century encyclopedia would have insisted that the sun revolves around the earth. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica asserted that bacteria causes the flu, since viruses hadn’t been discovered yet. So perhaps it’s not a question of whether to trust consensus. Rather, whose consensus do you want to trust: a handful of experts, or thousands of anonymous internet users and a clever computer algorithm?