Computing trust from revision history

A new model of distributed, collaborative information evolution is emerging. As exemplified in Wikipedia, online collaborative information repositories are being generated, updated, and maintained by a large and diverse community of users. Issues concerning trust arise when content is generated and updated by diverse populations. Since these information repositories are constantly under revision, trust determination is not simply a static process. In this paper, we explore ways of utilizing the revision history of an article to assess the trustworthiness of the article. We then present an experiment where we used this revision history-based trust model to assess the trustworthiness of a chain of successive versions of articles in Wikipedia and evaluated the assessments produced by the model.