A trust metric enabled Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has been described as “the encyclopaedia that works in practice but not in theory”. In theory, an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit should suffer from out-of-control trolling and vandalism, and collapse under its own weight in an instant. In practice, that hasn’t happened; vandals attack Wikipedia daily, but it still does very well as a useful source of information, especially if you bear in mind that its primary competition is not Britannica or other paid-for sources, but the rest of the Internet. Nonetheless, a recent controversy over malicious insertion of false information into Wikipedia had some concluding that the very process by which Wikipedia has “incurable flaws”.
Continue Reading 2 comments March 9th, 2006 Paul Crowley