The MacArthur Foundation’s Spotlight Blog recently featured a discussion about credibility and digital media. Notable researchers from a number of universities sound off on the most important issues facing web credibility today.

The November issue of First Monday contains an article from Thomas Chesney that describes a comparative evaluation of Wikipedia pages by experts and non-experts. A group of researcers were asked to evaluate pages from Wikipedia in their subject area or outside of their subject area. Chesney found that subject experts rated Wikipedia pages more highly than non-experts.

The article contains relatively little discussion about why this difference might occur, but there are clearly some interesting things going on here.

The Federa Trade Commission has developed a series of quiz-style games designed to teach skills related to trust onlineThe current suite of games includes “Beware of Spyware”, “Phishing Scams” and “Buddy Builder”, a game designed to teach young people to avoid dangerous people on social networking sites. [via]
In similar news, the Educational Testing Service has developed a new information literacy assessment test that includes a set of brief activities in a web browser. This trend toward more interactive interventions will hopefully help develop young people’s competencies in these areas. However, the preliminary results are less than stellar: only 49% of participants correctly identified the most trustworthy website from a set of sites. Fortunately, it looks like there is still work to be done in this area.

Collaborative information sharing sites like Wikipedia present a unique set of challenges related to credibility. In Puppy Smoothies,  Tom Cross describes a method to highlight information that has “venerability” on these kinds of sites. The idea being that information that has persisted for a long time without being overwritten is good information. Does this mean that information that is overwritten frequently is more likely to be bad information?

What does a numerical rating mean, and what effect does a number have on our perceptions and feelings of trust? This story at the New York Times explores the origins of a common wine rating scale, and asks what’s really behind the number.

One of the changes we made as part of the recent web site update was to draw attention to our site’s blog. Our plan for the blog is to use it as a source for interesting news stories about credibility issues and technologies online. We hope you will watch this blog and enjoy our view on credibility news. You can also use our site’s RSS feed to keep track of our blog in your RSS reader or homepage.

We’ve updated our web site with a new layout and new features. The new layout is designed to make it easier to access our projects and resources. We’ve added a discussion forum where you can provide feedback about our project and discuss credibility issues on the Internet. We’ve also added a new section with information about how you can help our project improve access to high-quality information on the Internet.

If you have any comments on the new design, please let us know! (more…)

We’veposted a beta version of a new software tool: ACE, the Automated Credibility Evaluator.

This tool analyzes Web sites and provides an automated assessment of their credibility, based upon credibility measures in information science research.

Try it out on your favorite site by clicking here.

Welcome to the Credibility Commons website. The Commons is a research initiative that aims to improve access to credible information on the Internet. The Commons is sponsored by the Information School at the University of Washington and the Information Institute of Syracuse.

We are currently working on a number of projects related to Internet credibility, including user studies and software tools. We hope you’ll stay tuned.

Here are some of our current projects:

• Reference Extract, a search engine that provides credible sources derived from reference librarian transactions

• OpenQA, a toolkit for producing question-answer sites

• ACE (beta), a web service that will evaluate y our site for common signs of trustworthiness

• Our research reports

Have fun exploring. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

The OpenQA project at the Information Institute of Syracuse has become an official part of the Credibility Commons. OpenQA is a web community system that allows people to propose ideas, questions and topics that bloggers can write about. It then collects the responses from users’ blogs and lets you browse and search the results.

OpenQA addresses issues of credibility and bias by providing a system for users to raise questions and to browse and compare responses. OpenQA emphasizes the reliability of provided by common responses and the context of individual responders.

Two Credibility Briefs have been added to the Reports section of the web site. These documents provide brief overviews of current services related to Internet credibility.

The first document describes the community response to the announcement of the Goodmail CertifiedEmail system. The second describes NewsTrust, the upcoming news site that claims to provide “news you can trust.”

Mike and Shaun were interviewed about the Commons in a new article at eSchoolNews Online:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=6306

Datasets and histograms used to build the current expanded index of Reference Extract are now available from the repository at:

http://eduref.org:8380/dspace/handle/2291/23

Materials from the Internet Credibility and the User Symposium April 11-13, 2005 Marriott Waterfront Hotel - Seattle, Washington have been added to the repository:

http://eduref.org:8380/dspace/handle/2291/2

An early form of a Credibility Repository is now available. This D Space system will house papers, data and software related to the Commons. The system will be refined and further developed throughout the coming weeks.

You can see it in development at:

http://eduref.org:8380/dspace/index.jsp

Read notes from the Seattle Symposium held in Seattle April 11 ?�� 13, 2005.

The Internet Credibility and the User Symposium was held April 11-13, 2005 at the Marriott Waterfront Hotel - Seattle, Washington
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One of the initial projects of the Commons is the development of Reference Extract. Reference Extract is an experimental web search engine built on the reference work of librarians. Librarians have long been seen as arbiters of quality and credibility. These librarians are now answering the questions of their users online through digital reference services. Reference Extract shall mine these questions and answers to create a new type of search engine. This search engine builds on the expert judgments of librarians in a modern, easy to use interface. Imagine searching the bookmarks of thousands of librarians and scientists. You can now try the prototype in its early stages of development.

The Credibility Commons receives startup funds from the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Funds from MacArthur will fund the initial activities of the Commons and to attract a wide range of commercial, educational, governmental, and not-for-profit into exploring credibility of Internet information.

The Credibility Commons is an experimental environment enabling individuals the opportunity to try out different approaches to improving access to credible information on the World Wide Web. Tools will be provided to researchers as well as the public, allowing them to try out search strategies, collections and other approaches to improving access. The Commons can be viewed as a collaborative space in which to share ideas, data sets, results and innovations. This project is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.