Wiki-Watch.org: a new tool to evaluate the quality of Wikipedia’s articles


Online service checking both the reliability of any article – and of any word within

A new tool to evaluate the quality of Wikipedia articles is now available. “With www.Wiki-Watch.org , everybody can check the reliability of information within Wikipedia’, says Professor Wolfgang Stock, one of the founders of Wiki-Watch, based at the European University ‘Viadrina’ in Frankfurt, Germany.
For the millions of people who look things up in Wikipedia, we offer a closer look into this fascinating system, how well the articles are edited and by whom. We are offering this service because we are great fans of Wikipedia and want to contribute to further to its improvement.’
Wiki-Watch is analyzing Wikipedia articles by data-mining every single entry ever made, checking formal criteria, such as the number of sources, the number and quality of editors as well as how many links are directed to an article. Within a second or two, the service is giving a reliability score for any of Wikipedia’s 3.5 million articles submitted through the Wiki-Watch.org website. ‘This algorithm has been developed by our project team in Germany and has been in service there for ten weeks. Now, it is available in English as a ‘beta’ version. Additionally, Wiki-Watch has incorporated ‘WikiTrust’, developed by the University of California Santa Cruz. This reputation system for Wikipedia authors and content is using a color code system to display the reputation of a text, according to it´s history and number of revisions by other users. This does help to spot recent and unqualified changes within the articles. It also enables users to trace a text back to its original author.
‘For Wikipedia users, these two methods combined do show whether you can trust any given Wikipedia article in its present form’, Stock says.

Furthermore, Wiki-Watch is shedding light on edit wars and on the activities of administrators as well as power users. “It is not always clear to the average Wikipedia user what is going on behind the scenes or how often articles actually were changed, or that virtual edit wars are going on’, explains Professor Johannes Weberling, the co-founder. ‘We are great fans of Wikipedia and with this online platform we are trying to make Wikipedia more reliable, more transparent and thus improve the online encyclopedia even further.’

www.Wiki-Watch.org

Contact:

Prof. Wolfgang Stock, Stock@Europa-Uni.de, cell +49-172-2900-387

Note: Please ignore the information currently provided by search engines. This still refers to a very different site, prior to a domain transfer. It does in no way reflect Wiki-Watch’s philosophy. We hope to see there: ‘Wiki-Watch.org is adding transparency to the global resource of knowledge. A free tool provided by the European University ’Viadrina’, Frankfurt, Germany.’

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