Wikipedia + Trustworthy Sources = Academic Librarian

Posted by Hazman Aziz On July - 7 - 2008

That’s would be my equation for to make my day today. Over the past 1.8 months working in the academic libraries environment, some academic librarians are favourite to the source of Wikipedia, while a minor are not in the favour of Wikipedia. What is that so?

Most of it, it is related to the question of trustworthy sources. Can we trust Wikipedia? Or the librarians are losing the cutting age skill in chasing the dragon’s knowledge. This is where today community is totally driven by the knowledge economy rather than skill. To the matter of that fact, I would like to rephrase that sentences again. I do admit that many of the librarians hold a little percentage of intellectual knowledge. But, ever since the advent of technology evolves, librarians are losing at this niche area. Especially, with the introduction of community’s collaboration. The jungle now is been cleared, and everyone is building block of information, bit by bit form a knowledge of basic foundation. Once again, who build this knowledge?

Where can we get the trustworthy sources?
Interesting, one Profesor from University of California at Santa Cruz’s WikiLab have a created a color-coded system that they believe reliably answers that question. This system is called WikiTrust. The colors suspect words orange relates to the deeper the orange the less trustworthy the author who added the words. measure contributors’ reputations based on how long their entries last without being revised. Showing their faith in the wiki process the researchers have—you guessed it—created a wiki to describe WikiTrust as reported by Andrea L. Foster on The Chronicles of Higher Education.

I still remember a number of librarians argued and discussed about Wikipedia sustainability:

The Magic of Wikipedia
…would rather trust their library experience to one of us. I find that comforting.I also answered my first “official” reference question this morning…it sounded like an elderly lady writing an article, who wanted to know both the order of succession for the presidency and (in brief) the causes of WWI. The first I could tell her off the top of m…
Bibliomaniac, Future Librarian, and Jedi Knight – Jun 29, 2008 5:58 AM

Under the Hood of Web 2.0 : the top ten programming concepts for librarians to understand
…Google and Wikipedia are chock full of good information about most technology. The bad news is that the language techies use to describe what they do is shaded in three-letter-acronyms, technical jargon and obscure references to text-based adventure games. It’s as if they do not want you to know what they are talking about. Well, I decided t…
The Other Librarian – Sep 26, 2007 10:50 PM

GLLS2007 Wrap Up
…sites and Wikipedia, saying, “Who are you going to trust – the government or the people?” The teen panel wouldn’t have happened at all without the invaluable help of Brian Myers. Several attendees blogged the sessions. You can find all posts tagged GLLS2007 at http://technorati.com/posts/tag/glls2007, where there is great coverage by The Utopia…
The Shifted Librarian – Aug 6, 2007 10:48 PM

Favourite Quote of the Week
…Google and Wikipedia) when it was for an important task. Paraphrasing, “I use Wikipedia a lot. I know you’re supposed to trust the sites that have a dot gov or dot edu extension, but who are you gonna trust? The government or the people?” He was 13. Stephen
Stephen’s Lighthouse – Jul 25, 2007 2:08 AM

Web 2.0 and What It Means to Libraries
…information at Wikipedia sites – accessing new information content college students use it a lot, well-educated people use it a lot what we don’t see is that folks think Wikipedia is the end-all-be-all for information if they are stumped after checking Wikipedia, they’ll ping their social network one of the big stories about the importance of th…
The Shifted Librarian - Apr 17, 2007 2:18 AM

Same excuses
…reliable than Wikipedia’s medical articles. Well, I don’t think so. Yes, of course, it’d be more reliable, but it’s not the point. Wikipedia’s medical entries are created and maintained by about a hundred editors (just some of them are physicians, academics). If those articles are well-referenced, then those should be reliable. It’s not a questi…
David Rothman - Mar 28, 2007 1:24 PM

What are wikis good for?
…in the Wikipedia). Ward Cunningham defined a wiki as follows: A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons (from The Wiki Way, page 16). The question is, who are the users? If the users are meant to be library staff working behind the …
Information Wants To Be Free – Aug 21, 2006 4:43 AM

So, what can we bring out of here?
Well, Associate Professor Luca de Alfaro, from Computer Engineering, UC Santa Cruz came out with a theory:

Abstract:
The Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia: anyone can contribute to its articles simply by clicking on an “edit” button. The open nature of the Wikipedia has been key to its success, but has a flip side: if anyone can edit, how can readers know whether to trust its content?

To help answer this question, we have developed a reputation system for Wikipedia authors, and a trust system for Wikipedia text. Authors gain reputation when their contributions are long-lived, and they lose reputation when their contributions are undone in short order. Each word in the Wikipedia is assigned a value of trust that depends on the reputation of its author, as well as on the reputation of the authors that subsequently revised the text where the word appears. To validate our algorithms, we show that reputation and trust have good predictive value: higher-reputation authors are more likely to give lasting contributions, and higher-trust text is less likely to be edited.

The trust can be visualized via an intuitive coloring of the text background. The coloring provides an effective way of spotting attempts to tamper with Wikipedia information. A trust-colored version of the entire English Wikipedia can be browsed at http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/

Let’s check out his presentation below:

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