Two sides of the coin: measuring and communicating the trustworthiness of online information

Information is the currency of the digital age – it is constantly communicated, exchanged and bartered, most commonly to support human understanding and decision-making. While the Internet and Web 2.0 have been pivotal in streamlining many of the information creation and dissemination processes, they have significantly complicated matters for users as well. Most notably, the substantial increase in the amount of content available online has introduced an information overload problem, while also exposing content with largely unknown levels of quality, leaving many users with the difficult question of, what information to trust? In this article we approach this problem from two perspectives, both aimed at supporting human decision-making using online information. First, we focus on the task of measuring the extent to which individuals should trust a piece of openly-sourced information (e.g., from Twitter, Facebook or a blog); this considers a range of factors and metrics in information provenance, quality and infrastructure integrity, and the person’s own preferences and opinion. Having calculated a measure of trustworthiness for an information item, we then consider how this rating and the related content could be communicated to users in a cognitively-enhanced manner, so as to build confidence in the information only where and when appropriate. This work concentrates on a range of potential visualisation techniques for trust, with special focus on radar graphs, and draws inspiration from the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), System Usability and Risk Communication. The novelty of our contribution stems from the comprehensive approach taken to address this very topical problem, ensuring that the trustworthiness of openly-sourced information is adequately measured and effectively communicated to users, thus enabling them to make informed decisions

Mutual evaluation of editors and texts for assessing quality of Wikipedia articles

ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose a method to identify good quality Wikipedia articles by mutually evaluating editors and texts. A major approach for assessing article quality is a text survival ratio based approach. In this approach, when a text survives beyond multiple edits, the text is assessed as good quality. This approach assumes that poor quality texts are deleted by editors with high possibility. However, many vandals delete good quality texts frequently, then the survival ratios of good quality texts are improperly decreased by vandals. As a result, many good quality texts are unfairly assessed as poor quality. In our method, we consider editor quality for calculating text quality, and decrease the impacts on text qualities by the vandals who has low quality. Using this improvement, the accuracy of the text quality should be improved. However, an inherent problem of this idea is that the editor qualities are calculated by the text qualities. To solve this problem, we mutually calculate the editor and text qualities until they converge. We did our experimental evaluation, and we confirmed that the proposed method could accurately assess the text qualities

Making Social Dynamics and Content Evolution Transparent in Collaboratively Written Text

This dissertation presents models and algorithms for accurately and efficiently extracting data from revisioned content in Collaborative Writing Systems about (i) the provenance and history of specific sequences of text, as well as (ii) interactions between editors via the content changes they perform, especially disagreement. Visualization tools are presented to gain further insights into the extracted data. Collaboration mechanisms to be researched with these new data and tools are discussed