Europe News
German watchdog monitoring English Wikipedia
Jan 13, 2011, 16:24 GMT
Berlin - A German watchdog project announced on Thursday that it had begun monitoring the quality of the English-language online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Wiki-Watch, a group operating from Viadrina University at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder on the Polish border, said its assessment of Wikipedia pages is entirely computerized.
Users can ask the Wiki-Watch website to check any of the 3.5 million Wikipedia pages and to highlight sentences that are potentially untrustworthy because they have never been altered.
The software only studies formal criteria, such as the number of books and journals quoted, the number and prominence of editors, and how many hyperlinks elsewhere in Wikipedia point towards the article.
Wiki-Watch says for example that the English article on United States President Barack Obama has been worked over by 4,425 authors and altered 15,000 times, earning it five stars, the highest rating.
Ten weeks ago, Wiki-Watch also began monitoring the German version of Wikipedia, which is sometimes seen as stricter than the English one, with German umpires often altering or deleting material.
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