Read What You Trust: An Open Wiki Model Enhanced by Social Context

Wiki systems, such as Wikipedia, provide a multitude of opportunities for large-scale online knowledge collaboration. Despite Wikipedia's successes with the open editing model, dissenting voices give rise to unreliable content due to conflicts amongst contributors. From our perspective, the conflict issue results from presenting the same knowledge to all readers, without regard for the importance of the underlying social context, which both reveals the bias of contributors and influences the knowledge perception of readers. Motivated by the insufficiency of the existing knowledge presentation model for Wiki systems, this paper presents Trust Wiki, a new Wiki model which leverages social context, including social background and relationship information, to present readers with personalized and credible knowledge. Our experiment shows, with reliable social context information, Trust Wiki can efficiently assign readers to their compatible editor community and present credible knowledge derived from that community. Although this new Wiki model focuses on reinforcing the neutrality policy of Wikipedia, it also casts light on the other content reliability problems in Wiki systems, such as vandalism and minority opinion suppression.