<img alt="" height="1" width="1">U. of California Researchers Hold Wikipedia Authors Accountable
Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) -1 hour ago
How do you know if what’s in Wikipedia is trustworthy? Researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz’s WikiLab have a created a color-coded ...

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Apparently the Cult of the Amateur is not Limited to Wikipedia.

Jon

Greasemonkey extensions can already do this.

I am working on an innovative new color-coding plan for automobiles. Those vehicle models that receive the lowest highway safety ratings (Buick Rendezvous, Ford Ranger, Nissan Frontier, etc.) will have a red sticker affixed to the lower right corner of their license plate. The next-least safe vehicles will get an orange sticker. And so on, up to the safest models on the road (Lexus ES300, Volkswagen Passat, Saturn VUE, etc.), which would get a bright green sticker with a smiley face imprinted on it.

This way, when you are driving and get into an accident, you will be able to crawl out of the wreckage and hobble over to examine the small, color-coded sticker on the other vehicle. If the sticker is red, you'll be able to say, "Damn, that was an unsafe vehicle that hit me! I knew something was fishy about him just before he rammed me." If the sticker is green, you'll have the leeway to say, "Wow, I wouldn't have expected that a safe <INSERT BRAND HERE> would have ruined my day with a near-fatal accident. Thank God for these stickers, though. They're reliable -- like Wikipedia!"

I hope to present my new initiative at the next summit of academics sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education. I hope that you all will be able to attend.

Ingenious as that is, Greg, I have a Better Ideaâ„¢.

Require all auto makes and models to roll off their factory floors in Green only, but with the warmer spectrum of color-tinted microcapsules embedded in the initial paint job, designed in such a way that the car will turn from Yellow to Orange to Red to Fuchsia with increasing frequency of run-ins with other cars. This will give drivers a clear indication of who to avoid on the road. People who drink or cell-phone and drive will of course be issued only Fuchsia cars to start.

Jon

Great idea, Jon.

But if you really want to give it the Wikipediot touch, anyone who inadvertently drives behind a Fuchsia car and agrees with the way that driver is driving, will also have their car automatically painted Fuchsia by a 16-year-old who has never driven a car before.

Would one of the mods please rename this thread, Back To the Fuchsia.

Fucker, I just spit soda.

Don't thank me. Thank Doc Brown.

You built a time machine... out of an encyclopedia?!

Yes. It's a Time Sink, built with a Fux Capacitor.

I can hardly wait for the sequel —

Fuchsia 2

Jon

On third thought, though, I think we've probably wasted a excess of Gray cells on this color-coding problem. A much simpler solution would be to follow the model of UC Santa Claus Checkin-A-List Method, and simply design cars that turn a shade more Orange every time you put them in reverse. This will of course require drivers who want to keep their licenses very long at all to install both front and back doors on their garages, or else buy houses with circular driveways. But, hell, we are talking California-Centrism here.

Jon

I think this is pretty good. Here is Zermelo set theory as I wrote it in 2003

http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php?t...y&oldid=1457073

You see it is all orange because the author has gained no trust in the system. Now here it is in January 2007

http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php?t...oldid=101040161

and you see that author (me) has gained a considerable degree of trust within the whole system. Compare that to the level of trust the same author holds among the humans there, and you will understand why I prefer the machine.

[EDIT]

Oops change my mind. Here is Hume's principle pretty much as I wrote it in 2005.

http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php?t...&oldid=21029537

Now here it is as rewritten by Richard Heck, who is one of the most greatly respected philosophers of mathematics today

http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php?t...&oldid=67744523

You see it is all orange. Perhaps that is because he had not been long editing there? Also, most of the changes he made at that point were organisational. The system does not seem able to spot the distinction between moving paragraphs around, stylistic changes, versus content changes.

Here is a precise example of this error happening. This paragraph



is entirely orange in Heck's revision. But in the older revision exactly the same paragraph is coloured white.

http://wiki-trust.cse.ucsc.edu/index.php?t...&oldid=67744523

The system has not spotted that an added indent is not material to the content of the article.

Wiki-Truss

Orange you glad Mathematics is founded on Proof — not Feng Shui?

I know I am …

Besides all that, Wiki-Truss is a year and half out-of-date:


Jon

The Arch Coal article, which is still remarkably similar to what I originally wrote, thanks to the fact that JzG plagiarized the original, is to be nearly completely trusted, according to Santa Cruz. There's just a hint of orange in a couple of spots.

Yet, I was banned from Wikipedia for creating this article -- for free -- and releasing it under the terms of the GFDL.

What does that say about the system?

Greg

That version was copied from Wikipedia Review on 19 Sep 2006 and last updated on 20 Jan 2007.

Jon

Hmmm …

Jon

How appropriate that the "tart orange" be about the only thing on that page not colored orange!

Greg