CollaborativeTrust.com develops technology and tools that help people
create trustable collaborative content.
WikiTrust
WikiTrust is a tool implementing a reputation and trust system for
wiki-based collaboration:
- The reputation system rewards authors who provide lasting
contributions: authors gain reputation when their contributions are
long-lived, and they lose reputation when their contributions are
undone in short order. The reputtion system thus provides an
incentive towards constructive behavior; the reputation of an author
also offers a rough estimate of the author's reliability.
- The trust system provides a visual indication of the reliability of
text: words with white background are the most trusted, and words with
orange background are the least trusted.
The trust value of each word is computed on the basis of the
reputation of its author, as well as on the reputation of the authors
that subsequently revised the text where the word appears.
Here is a
demo
of WikiTrust applied to the Wikipedia.
WikiTrust is currently suited to the analysis of static dumps of wiki
information.
We are currently developing code suitable for trust-coloring a wiki in
real-time, as edits are made.
The code can be applied to wikis, or to any other collection of
versioned documents.
For more information on the algorithms used, see the papers on the
reputation
and
trust
sytems.
Code
The code of WikiTrust is released as
open source.
The code is released under the BSD license, except for small plug-ins that
connect directly to
MediaWiki,
and that are released under the GPL.
WikiTrust is written mostly in
Ocaml, and
uses small amounts of
PHP and
Python.
We manage the code using Git, and the
best way to get an up-to-date version of the code is to clone our
repository. This is particularly recommended for people who are
interested in developing, as it facilitates the process of
contributing code.
To get the code, go in a directory of your choice, and do the
following (execute both commands from the same directory):
- git clone git://git.collaborativetrust.com/pub/git/wikitrust.git
This clones the wikitrust repository, where we keep the
WikiTrust code.
- git clone git://git.collaborativetrust.com/pub/git/OcamlLdaLibs.git
This clones the OcamlLdaLibs repository, which contains
some Ocaml libraries that WikiTrust needs.
If you find
Git difficult to use, here
are tarballs of the source code.
These tarballs are not updated with the same frequency as the Git
repository.
Setup
git clone git://git.collaborativetrust.com/pub/git/wikitrust.git
git clone git://git.collaborativetrust.com/pub/git/OcamlLdaLibs.git
cd OcamlLdaLibs
make all
make allopt
cd ../wikitrust/batch
Read the
wikitrust/batch/doc/README file. Generally, you can:
cd analysis
make all
make allopt
and then proceed as indicated in the above README file.
Contributing
If you want to do bleeding-edge development, get yourself a copy of
the ''testing'' branch:
git checkout -b testing origin/testing
and work in the ''testing'' branch. When you want to give back the
changes to us developers, proceed as follows.
Either you can make patches, and email them to us, as indicated in the
Git
manual, or you can make your own public repository, and ask us to
pull from it.
We much prefer this latter way of interaction.
To create your own public repository, I will assume that your code is
in
~/wikitrust. Do:
mkdir git
cd git
git clone --bare ~/wikitrust wikitrust.git
git touch wikitrust.git/git-daemon-export-ok
Then, copy
~/git/wikitrust.git to a server in a path where
the git daemon can export it, and let us know the git URL for it.
Developers
The main developers are
Luca de Alfaro,
B. Thomas Adler, and
Ian Pye.
Other people who contributed include
Jason Benterou,
Marco Faella,
Vishwanath Raman, and
Gillian Smith.
Support
If you are interested in support for WikiTrust, or if you would like
to have WikiTrust adapted to specific wikis or applications,
you can contact the developers at
developers@collaborativetrust.com