Provenance and Wikipedia
I’ve been thinking a lot about provenance. In fact we all think about provenance to some degree - it’s why we’ll happily ignore that guy on the street shouting about the end of the world, but we’ll panic if Barack Obama interrupts our regular viewing to tell us that asteroid is heading toward Earth.
But trust - or authority - isn’t just about the author, it’s also about the process. If the message is “the Earth will be destroyed in 24 hours”, then the author (Barack Obama versus Guy) and the process (television interruption versus shouting on a street corner) are equally important. If Obama was ranting on a street corner, we’d be doubtful; if street guy interrupted our television, we’d think it was a joke. We need both.
So what then of a given Wikipedia article? Not all articles are equally trustworthy, so they shouldn’t be trusted equally. Without knowing anything about the people who wrote an article, I think we can still surface details about its history, primarily by tapping into the process — that is, the judgments of Wikipedian moderators, and some raw numbers.
To that end, I’ve put together a small extension for Firefox, which you can get here. It uses a simple set of rules that I require before I’ll trust a Wikipedia article. I don’t know what you would find trustworthy, so in future I’ll make it configurable. Just consider it an experiment for now.
Here’s how it works:
- It looks at Wikipedia pages and Wikipedia links found on external sites.
- It will either add a small coloured flag to the top right of a Wikipedia page (_ _ _) or shade each link on an external site; colours are determined according to these rules:
- Red: If it has a message box requesting improvement (needs references, it reads like an advertisement etc). I consider this to be the biggest alarm that Wikipedia can send you. It’s an indicator that the process has failed in some way and that the information needs to be checked.
- Orange: If the article is locked, or if the ratio of edits in the past month is high. This indicates volatility and tells me that information is in flux.
- Green: Everything checks out
And here’s a trivial example of how it would appear:
A few notes:
- It’s probably not useful in its current format. It’s not tested.
- If the link doesn’t work automatically, you’ll have to download it first, then go to “Add-ons”, then “Install from file”, or somesuch (depends on your version of Firefox).
- It runs in the background, so the shading won’t happen immediately.
- Use at own risk. This is my first Firefox extension, so I don’t know what it’s capable of. It could kill your pets.
