Interesting project out of University of California at Santa Cruz: software that can (purportedly) track the accuracy of information inside Wikipedia entries. The software, developed by Luca de Alfaro, a Stanford Ph.D. who is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UCSC, monitors the trustworthiness of Wikipedia entries based on the reputations of their contributors, and modifies the display of Wikipedia articles based on realtime, calculated contributor metadata.
Quoting from Professor de Alfaro’s own statement about the project, it computes the “trust value of each word of a Wikipedia article” based on the reputation of its original author and the reputation of all its subsequent authors. If you’re curious to try it out, there’s a description and demo of the system available at the UC Santa Cruz web site, using a dump from Wikipedia created in February of 2007.
