A MediaWiki extension that computes the origin, author, and extent of revision of wiki text

WikiTrust is an open-source MediaWiki extension that computes the origin and author of every word of a wiki, as well as a measure of text trust that indicates the extent with which text has been revised.  To use WikiTrust, you click on a special wiktrust tab added by the extension.  In the resulting view, the portions of a page that changed recently appear with orange background; the orange color is the more intense, the less the change has been revised.  By clicking on any word, you can determine who inserted the word, and you can examine the precise context in which the word was inserted.  It is possible to install WikiTrust in such a way that the tab appears only for registered users, who choose to activate the extension.  We have both an informal description of our algorithms, and talks and papers that present the details.  You may also wish to read the frequently asked questions.

The tool has two main modes of operation:

• The online mode is what you need if you want to add a wikitrust tab to your wiki. The extension analyzes edits, and displays trust information, in real-time; it can be deployed both on new, and existing, wikis. 
• The batch mode is what you need to perform a batch analysis of the user contributions and interaction on a wiki. In particular, this mode allows the computation of the user-to-user social networks of interaction on the Wikipedia, with edges containing both positive and negative feedback, according to how users appreciated each other's work.  You can also easily write your own wiki analysis on top of WikiTrust.
  

Here are some details on the algorithm used by WikiTrust, and on the goals of the WikiTrust project.
The WikiTrust project is part of ongoing work at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on reputation systems, online collaboration, and information trust. For more information, you can write to help@wikitrust.net .   The main developers are Luca de Alfaro, Bo Adler, and Ian Pye; we are also very grateful to everyone who contributed to WikiTrust.

Demo

To see a demo, do the following:

1. Install the WikiTrust add-on for Firefox
2. Visit the Italian Wikipedia (we will be adding other Wikipedias soon).
   

The extension detects when you visit one of the Wikipedias we have, and adds a trust tab pointing to our trust colored data.  The information on text trust, origin, and author is then computed and visualized by contacting both our servers at UC Santa Cruz and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) servers.  This has a few consequences:

• The demo is slow, as it involves a lot of back-and-forth between WMF and UCSC servers; it would be much faster if it ran at the WMF directly.
• As the code is not running at the WMF, our servers are not notified when someone edits a page.  Thus, when you request information on a revision, we occasionally tell you that we don't have the information, and to try again in ten seconds or so.  In the meantime, our server at UCSC fetches from WMF the revision, and analyzes it.  Again, this would not happen if WikiTrust was running more tightly integrated in the WMF.
  
• Since we cannot authenticate users (the WMF, not us, is sent the authentication cookies), we had to turn off a button that enabled users to vote for the correctness of text (inspired by the work on flagged revisions: indeed, we could tie the flag to this vote action).

For more information, see our page on the Firefox extension.

The demo is being regularly updated!  We will be working to add Wikipedias to the demo, and to improve it.  When new Wikipedias become available, you should simply be able to go to them, and see the results.  Check the WikiTrust add-on page for updates, as it is not auto-updating yet.