WikiLyzer: Interactive Information Quality Assessment in Wikipedia

Digital libraries and services enable users to access large amounts of data on demand. Yet, quality assessment of information encountered on the Internet remains an elusive open issue. For example, Wikipedia, one of the most visited platforms on the Web, hosts thousands of user-generated articles and undergoes 12 million edits/contributions per month. User-generated content is undoubtedly one of the keys to its success, but also a hindrance to good quality: contributions can be of poor quality because anyone, even anonymous users, can participate. Though Wikipedia has defined guidelines as to what makes the perfect article, authors find it difficult to assert whether their contributions comply with them and reviewers cannot cope with the ever growing amount of articles pending review. Great efforts have been invested in algorithmic methods for automatic classification of Wikipedia articles (as featured or non-featured) and for quality flaw detection. However, little has been done to support quality assessment of user-generated content through interactive tools that combine automatic methods and human intelligence. We developed WikiLyzer, a Web toolkit comprising three interactive applications designed to assist (i) knowledge discovery experts in creating and testing metrics for quality measurement, (ii) Wikipedia users searching for good articles, and (iii) Wikipedia authors that need to identify weaknesses to improve a particular article. A design study sheds a light on how experts could create complex quality metrics with our tool, while a user study reports on its usefulness to identify high-quality content.