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What should user reputation be on Wikipedia?

From Wikimania


What should user reputation be on Wikipedia?

Leaders Luca de Alfaro (UC Santa Cruz), Bo Adler (UC Santa Cruz), Ian Pye (UC Santa Cruz), Vishwanath Raman (UC Santa Cruz)
Themes AcademicContent
About the leaders
Luca de Alfaro is an associate professor of Computer Engineering at the UC Santa Cruz
Bo Adler is a graduate student at the UCSC
Ian Pye is a graduate student at the UCSC.
Vishwanath Raman is a graduate student at UCSC.
Abstract

A sound, quantitative measure of the contribution given by individual authors to Wikipedia articles, and to the Wikipedia as a whole, could serve multiple purposes on the Wikipedia. When giving credit for articles, it would be possible to give special mention to the authors who gave the greatest contributions, distinguishing them from the ones who provided only minor edits. Acknowledging, and displaying, the amount of contribution of authors to articles could constitute a powerful incentive to contributing.

To be useful, a measure of author contribution must satisfy two requirements:

  • Scientific soundness. The measure should capture the extent of an author contribution. The measure should also not be easily inflated via robots or via the use of fake identities (sock-puppets).
  • Social acceptance. Wikipedia contributors with no special scientific background should be able to understand in intuitive terms how the contribution measure works, and the measure itself should be considered sound and fair by the members of the Wikipedia community.

Many simple measures in current use fail one or both of these criteria: for instance, edit count can be inflated via robots, and account age does not necessarily correlate to contribution.

In this workshop, participants will propose and compare different contribution measures, with the goal of identifying one, or a few, candidate measures for implementation. The workshop will also explore the issue of how to use the measure to create a positive incentive for authors to contribute high quality content to the Wikipedia.

Language English
Video (download)