Project aims to rate trustworthiness of Wikipedians

From the 8/3 Chronicle's Wired Campus....
If you are looking to try and help students mine the good form the bad of WIkipedia, a new project may be of help:
"...Researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz are trying to make that process simpler. They've designed software that color-codes Wikipedia entries, identifying those portions deemed trustworthy and those that might be taken with a grain of salt. To determine which passages make the grade, the researchers analyzed Wikipedia's editing history, tracking material that has remained on the site for a long time and edits that have been quickly overruled. A Wikipedian with a distinguished record of unchanged edits is declared trustworthy, and his or her contributions are left untouched on the Santa Cruz team's color-coded pages. But a contributor whose posts have frequently been changed or deleted is considered suspect, and his or her content is highlighted in orange. (The darker the orange, the more spurious the content is thought to be.) The researchers, led by Luca de Alfaro, an associate professor of computer engineering, have posted 1,000 demonstration pages on their Web site, and the samples show that the sorting process is pretty acute... Because the software assesses the histories of Wikipedia posters without actually fact-checking, it won't necessarily direct people to Wikipedia's best, most academically rigorous articles. But the program might be a useful tool for professors who want their students to examine closely how Wikipedia works rather than take it as gospel. --Brock Read"