A content-driven reputation system for the Wikipedia

Abstract

On-line forums for the collaborative creation of bodies of information are a phenomenon of rising importance; the Wikipedia is one of the best-known examples. The open nature of such forums could benet from a notion of reputation for its authors. Author reputation could be used to ag new contributions from low-reputation authors, and it could be used to allow only authors with good reputation to contribute to controversial or critical pages. A reputation system for the Wikipedia would also provide an incentive to give high-quality contributions. We present in this paper a novel type of content-driven reputation system for Wikipedia authors. In our system, authors gain reputation when the edits and text additions they perform to Wikipedia articles are long-lived, and they lose reputation when their changes are undone in short order. We have implemented the pro-posed system, and we have used it to analyze the en-tire Italian and French Wikipedias, consisting of a to-tal of 691,551 pages and 5,587,523 revisions. Our re-sults show that our notion of reputation has good pre-dictive value: changes performed by low-reputation au-thors have a signicantly larger than average probability of having poor quality, and of being undone.