Color Code Feature in Wikipedia – A Step Towards Increasing Credibility

To make itself a more trustworthy source, color codes will be used to show the reliability of an author by Wikipedia  This optional feature named “WikiTrust”, depending on the author’s reputation will allocate color code to the text which has been newly edited.

Wikipedia though famous for vast number of articles it caters, is not treated as reliable. Wikipedia is working for its rehabilitation in this direction. From this fall, bright orange background will be given to the text that is from new or questionable source while lighter shade will be provided to the text from trusted writers.

The people visiting Wikipedia every month are more than 60 million. Since anyone can edit the information on the site it is very though to separate credible information from edits done by unreliable sources. Wikipedia is very big and this was the reason according to Microsoft that killed Encarta encyclopedia.

Now with the help of the new color-coding system in place as more people view the new text on Wikipedia more edit of the text may take place turning the background from orange to white. That way more trust will be obtained with time. The things which people agree will remain as reliable information.

The WikiTrust tool that has Wikipedia color-coding feature measures trustworthiness of an author. This will show the time over which the edit of an author survives without having objections from other editors. Authors based on their past reputation will have a reputation score that varies from zero to nine.

The new color-coding system in the first place is to be applied to the articles pertaining to living people since these pages are most likely to have malicious edits. Popular or controversial pages such as that of Barak Obama or Britney Spears have restriction about people who can edit them, so this new feature will be applied to the left over personality pages.