Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

I’m in Luserna for blow minding 3 weeks of Webvalley.
Now listening to Enrico Giovannini of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development “democracy and statistics”. You can watch what we are listening on ustream.tv.
Online Video provided by Ustream.
And blogging on Webvalley blog as well!

Some time ago I started TrentoWiki.it. I opened TrentoWiki because I needed a place to store information about the places, the events, the many opportunities that this small charming city and its surroundings offer. Up to now it didn’t attract thousands of contributors but it is anyway a useful service at least for myself.

So, who can be interested in a Wiki about Trento?
(1) People who are going to come to Trento (because of a conference, such as the upcoming conference about Free Software (May 16, 2008), or BlogFest in Riva del Garda, or for working in a research centre or just for tourism) and might be able to find information in the wiki, and in fact one of the most accessed pages in “Cercare casa a Trento” (find house in Trento) and Photos of Trento), and
(2) people who lives in Trento and possibly don’t know about all the interesting stuff happening and available in the city.
So please share your local knowledge and insights and, please, be bold in editing TrentoWiki!

TrentoWiki is Mediawiki powered, just like Wikipedia.
The license is Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 which means that the knowledge created on the wiki can be reused legally elsewhere as long as attribution is given and the license remains the same; this means that even if I decide to close the wiki or anything else, all the content can be moved by anyone elsewhere.
TrentoWiki is opened to anonymous editing but you are certainly welcome to create an identity on the wiki.
For me running a wiki is also a very useful experiment, for example for experimenting with the challenge to be multilingual (there is a Category:English) which will be an issue also for the project of getting a wiki internal to my research institute adopted. And it is also an experiment because I’m curious to see if a wiki targeted to a small community can work even by reaching a critical mass of few users. We’ll see, and in the meantime, please do join TrentoWiki.it

I just discovered that there is (was?) a proposal for implementing a trust network in Wikipedia.
The proposal originated from a posting of Jimbo Wales himself on a mailing list in February 2004.
Some exerpts from the Wikipedia article follow:

The proposed system has the three key ideas: (1) giving users a formal way of declaring their confidence in other users, (2) a way of seeing which users have declared their trust of a particular user, and (3) the resulting structure of trust-relationships formed between all users.
It provides an additional piece of information that may be useful when coming across another user for the first time. The Wikipedia user base is so large that two well-established and respected editors, concentrating on different areas of Wikipedia, may have no contact between each other for some time. Reading an editor’s user page, browsing through their contributions, and reading the threads in their talk are valuable but time-consuming methods of getting to know someone. Discovering that several reputable users, or users that you have particular regard for, have expressed their trust in an editor is a strong indicator of that editor’s value to Wikipedia. However, the sheer number of editors who trust a user should not be taken as a clear measurement of that user’s trustworthiness: the fact that a user is trusted by dozens of suspected sockpuppets would only harm their reputation.
There are a variety of reasons to express trust in another user: you may have worked together on a proposal or article, reviewed many of their edits in articles on your watchlist, or know them personally. Liking another user should not generally be enough; trusting somebody requires being confident that their contributions are civil, constructive and of generally high quality.

Of course distrust is a tough topic as usual.

Additionally, it would be wise to consider carefully any thoughts of writing explicit statements of distrust, bearing in mind the no personal attacks policy.

It is important to remember that the trust network is not a popularity contest, and so there is no need to actively seek out declarations of trust. The fact that another user has not made a declaration of trust in your favour is by no means a declaration of distrust.

And which trust metric is most suited is tackled as well:

The network itself can be analysed using a trust metric to rate individual users. There are very many different ways to do this, which will produce quite different results, and it is important to note that no metric is endorsed by this proposal.
The simplest trust metric is to count the number of users who trust the rated user, but this system is vulnerable to attack (for instance, the use of sockpuppet accounts to trust oneself).
Another is to count how many links there are in the chain of trust between yourself and another user: if I trust A, who trusts B, who trusts C, and this is the shortest path from myself to C, then C is three links away from me. I might decide that I explicitly trust anybody one link away from me, and implicitly trust anybody up to three links away. This is very different to the previous case: the measurement is personal, not absolute, and will not be affected by sock puppetry.

Since “who trusts you?” is more important than “how many people trust you?” there is little point in creating sock puppets to declare trust in yourself.

The original post of Jimbo is precious as well.

But most would adopt a personal policy of giving mostly positives or abstaining, reserving negatives for worst case scenarios.
Newcomers would have no rating at all, obviously. Very prominent people would have lots of ratings, mostly positive I would have to assume. I would probably have 95% positive rating, but not perfect, since beloved though I am and obviously deserve to be (*wink*), I am a target.
We’d likely see perfect positive ratings for people like Michael Hardy, who keeps his nose to the grindstone editing topics that aren’t controversial, and who stays out of internal politics almost
completely as far as I know.
Some sysops have taken enormous and weighty responsibilities on themselves to do important but controversial work like VfD or banning trolls or mediating disputes or editing articles about the Middle East. We’d naturally expect them to get mixed reviews, but we might be surprised… lots of people would give them positive ratings just for doing those jobs, acknowledging the difficulty and risk involved.

And then Jimbo lists advantages and disadvantages, very interesting!

Well, I’m phauly on Wikipedia, I think you should trust me.

Yesterday I was looking for the wikipedia page for google talk. It was saying something like “… Google is rumored to be developing …” (see historic version). Today I reload the page and there is complete page full of details. There is also an Easter Eggs section! Already! And it was released today!! Wow, wikipedia is really collective knowledge at power!
Since it is only for Windows, I have no chance to try GoogleTalk and anyway I don’t miss it at all.
In the meantime, I try to guess the next subdomain will be office.google.com but the link for now leads somewhere else …

Wikipedia Charts are very cool. They show the evolution in time of the number of Wikipedians - Articles - Database - Links - Daily Usage. See the All languages or for the Italian version. There are so many data you could design a lot of interesting tests. This also reminds me of this event:
Wikimania 2005 - The First International Wikimedia Conference, August 4-8, 2005, Frankfurt am Main.

Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005.
Original research is welcome, but not required. Be bold in your submissions! Wikimania is meant to be both a scientific conference and a social event. (from WikiMania Call4Papers).
I’m thinking about going. By chance, can you host me during these days in Frankfurt?

The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir (part1) (part2) posted on SlashDot is a terrific read. I really really really recommend it!
“Larry Sanger was one of the moving forces behind the pioneering Nupedia project. That makes him one of the people to thank for Wikipedia, which has been enjoying more and more visibility of late. Sanger has prepared a lengthy, informative account of the early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia, including some cogent observations on project management, online legitimacy, dealing with trolls, and other hazards of running a large, collaborative project over the Internet.”
I also recommend the Power Structure page on meta.wikipedia.org
“Wikipedia’s present power structure is a mix of anarchic, despotic, democratic, republican, meritocratic, technocratic, and even plutocratic elements”

Since I spoke of WikiTravel, I like to mention World66. That seems a lot more advanced.
I’m wondering if my next holidays will be based on a work licenced under a Creative Commons licence. That would be great!

Wikitravel.org is a free (as in freedom), complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide.
Who create and update the guide? You! Yes, thanks to the disruptive technology called wiki, you can go on Wikitravel.org and edit the page about your city and your country or whatever page!
[Instruction: go to a wikitravel page, scroll to the bottom, click on "Edit this page" link, enjoy!]
Continue Reading