Read Me
WikiTrust is a MediaWiki extension that computes in real time the
reputation of wiki authors, and the trust of wiki text. Text trust is
displayed via different colors for the text background, from dark
orange (low trust) to white (maximum trust). The colors can be easily
changed by changing a skin file. WikiTrust also computes, for each
word of text, the author of the word, and the revision where the word
was first inserted. When clicking on a word, the user is sent to the
revision diff where the word was added. When hovering with the mouse
over a word, a pop-up displays the name of the word's author.
The WikiTrust extension can be added to an existing wiki, or to a new
one. If the extension is added to a new wiki, it will start computing
reputations and trusts as soon as someone makes an edit, or requests
to view a trust-colored revision. The reputation and trust
computation takes some time, after which the coloring is available.
If you switch the extension off, then on, the extension will compute
the missing reputation and trust values in a self-healing,
fault-tolerant fashion.
AUTHORS:
The main developers are:
- Luca de Alfaro (luca@dealfaro.com)
- Ian Pye (ipye@gmail.com)
- Bo Adler (thumper@alumni.caltech.edu)
Other contributors:
- Krishnendu Chatterjee (krish.chat@gmail.com)
- Vishwanath Raman (vishwa@soe.ucsc.edu)
Also worked on this project:
- Jason Benterou
- Jessica Gronski
INSTALLATION PROCEDURE:
We describe in this README file the use of WikiTrust as a MediaWiki
extension.
Installation instructions for the MWF are given in README-WMF.
PREREQUISITES:
1) Install mysql and mediawiki. In Ubuntu / Debian, you can install
the packages:
mediawiki
php5-cli
mysql-server
mysql-client
tidy
In other distributions, follow the instructions at
www.mediawiki.org.
================================================================
THE FAST WAY:
We provide a statically-linked executable, which is built under
Ubuntu, but should work under many versions of linux.
If you are happy using it, then you can use these abbreaviated
instructions. Otherwise, see at the bottom of this file for an
alternative to step 2) below, which involves compiling
eval_online_wiki from source.
2) Take a deep breath.
3) Next, you need to unpack and install the trust coloring extension in
mediawiki. If you have downloaded a tarball, you can do:
$ cp wikitrust-xyz.tgz /var/lib/mediawiki/extensions
$ cd /var/lib/mediawiki/extensions
$ tar xfvz wikitrust-xyz.tgz
where xyz is the version information for the tarball.
You should also move the executables to the
/var/lib/mediawiki/extensions directory.
If you use git, then you should really be compiling WikiTrust
from scratch; otherwise, what's the point?
4) You should activate the extension by editing the file
LocalSettings.php (part of the MediaWiki installation), adding the
following lines:
$wgUseTidy = true; // Enable Tidy
$wgUseAjax = true; // Enable Ajax (needed for voting)
require_once( $IP . "/extensions/WikiTrust/WikiTrust.php" );
You can look in WikiTrust.php (located at WikiTrust/WikiTrust.php)
for a list of all the configurable variables. The defaults should
be correct for most installation, but you can override
values by placing assignments in your LocalSettings.php
after the require_once() call for the WikiTrust extension.
Some settings that you might like to use instead:
$wgWikiTrustGadget = "gadget-WikiTrust";
By default the trust tab is always visible.
Set this as above to make it visible only to users opting in.
$wgWikiTrustShowVoteButton = false;
The default is to always show a "vote" button; disable this
feature by setting it to false.
$wgWikiTrustLog = "/tmp/{$wgDBname}-trust.log";
This creates a log of the analysis of how useful each contribution to
the wiki is, as well as a log of all user reputation changes.
We advise you to create such a log: it contains very useful
information, and it is likely that we will develop a variety of tools
to extract the information present. You don't want to miss out. Note
that you are responsible for rotating and compressing the log (e.g., via
logrotate, or /etc/logrotate.conf or /etc/logrotate.d/
As an example, we usually test with these lines added to
our LocalSettings.php file:
$wgUseTidy = true;
$wgUseAjax = true;
require_once( $IP . "/extensions/WikiTrust/WikiTrust.php" );
5) You need to make the installation readable from the web server.
$ chmod a+rX /var/lib/mediawiki/extensions/WikiTrust/*.php
$ chmod -R a+rX /var/lib/mediawiki/extensions/WikiTrust/includes
$ chmod -R a+rX /var/lib/mediawiki/extensions/WikiTrust/css
$ chmod -R a+rX /var/lib/mediawiki/extensions/WikiTrust/js
Be careful not to give access to the web server to the other files,
as there may be obscure security issues associated with, for
instance, your web server having access to the .git directory (if
you got wikitrust via git).
6) You need to create the database tables that the trust coloring
extension will use. Assuming that the mediawiki database is called
"wikidb" (this is the default name: you give a name to the database
when you create the wiki instance during the MediaWiki installation
process), proceed as follows:
$ cd sql
$ ./create_db.php "path_to_mediawiki" "mysql_root_user_name"
where path_to_mediawiki is the path to the mediawiki installation.
A typical command for Ubuntu is:
$ ./create_db.php /usr/share/mediawiki root
If you need to remove the tables first, then do instead:
$ cd sql
$ ./create_db.php "path_to_mediawiki" "mysql_root_user_name" remove
$ ./create_db.php "path_to_mediawiki" "mysql_root_user_name"
7) If there are already revisions in the wiki, you should first
analyze their trust, via:
$ ./eval_online_wiki -db_user <username> -db_pass <pwd> -db_name <db_name>
The above command analyzes all revisions in a single sweep. You
should expect a speed of between 10 to 60 revisions per second,
depending on your hardware. You can launch multiple
eval_online_wiki in parallel, and they play nicely with each other.
We fould that the performance increased up to 4 or 5 simultanous
processes; beyond that, the database is the bottleneck. This is
however very hardware dependent. If you prefer, you can limit each
invocation of the command to a certain number of revisions, for
example 1000, by doing:
$ ./eval_online_wiki -n_events 1000 -db_user <username> -db_pass <pwd> -db_name <db_name>
You can then give the command many times, until all the wiki is
analyzed. You can also slow down the processing via the
-throttle_delay option, if you wish to limit the CPU or database
load; for instance
-throttle_delay 0.2
will insert a 0.2-second delay between the analysis of revisions.
eval_online_wiki has many options, of which only some are
documented here.
Typical values for database username and password are:
username: wikiuser
db_name: wikidb
If you wish to redo the analysis from scratch, throwing away the
results of previous analyses, you can use the option '-delete_all':
$ ./eval_online_wiki -delete_all -db_user <username> -db_pass <pwd> -db_name <db_name>
Warning: the analysis can take a long time on very large wikis, so
do not use the option '-delete_all' lightly!
8) You should now see a trust tab. Click on it, or edit a revision, and
the trust of all revision text, and the reputation of all authors,
will be computed.
The trust coloring is updated automatically whenever a user edits
an article, or requests to view the trust informaton for a
revision. In particular, when a user edits an article, or when
someone asks to view the trust information, WikiTrust computes the
trust coloring not only for the newest revision, but for all past
revisions of all wiki articles that have not been colored yet.
9) If you wish to upload pages to the wiki from a dump file, go to the
test-scripts directory, and follow the instructions in the README
file there.
================================================================
COMPILING FROM SOURCE
If you like, you can also build the packages from source.
Follow these instructions in place of step 2) above.
2a) You need to install some packages for Ocaml. There are two ways.
2a1) The best way is to use godi (http://godi.camlcity.org), as this
provides a simple way to get all the packages you need, and it
enables you to build everything in userspace.
Get godi from http://godi.camlcity.org/godi/index.html and
download godi. Follow the instructions to install it. Install
the following Ocaml packages from godi (use godi_console to
install them):
godi-extlib
godi-findlib
godi-json-wheel
godi-ocaml-mysql
godi-ocamlnet
godi-pcre
godi-sexplib
godi-type-conv
godi-xml-light
godi-zip
For the godi-ocaml-mysql package, you will also need
the mysql client library. On Ubuntu, this is package
libmysqlclient16-dev
2a2) If you do not wish to use godi, you can get the above packages
either from their source, or from the linux distribution you
are using. For Ubuntu, you can use the following packages:
ocaml (version 3.10.0 or greater)
ocaml-base
ocaml-native-compilers
ocaml-findlib
libmysql-ocaml
libmysql-ocaml-dev
libextlib-ocaml-dev
python-mysqldb
libxml-light-ocaml-dev
libzip-ocaml-dev
You also need:
type-conv
sexplib
Which are available from
http://www.janestcapital.com/ocaml/index.html .
2b) You need to obtain OcamlLdaLibs. You can get them from
http://ocamlldalibs.sourceforge.net as either a tarball,
or via git:
$ git clone git://ocamlldalibs.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/ocamlldalibs
2c) Make OcamlLdaLibs and install them.
First, do:
$ cd ocamlldalibs
Then, there are various cases:
- If you used godi:
$ make all-godi
- If you can install Ocaml libraries without sudo rights:
$ make all
- If you did not use godi, and you need sudo to install Ocaml libraries:
$ make all-sudo
2d) Get the WikiTrust code using git:
$ cd /var/lib/mediawiki/extensions
$ git clone git://wikitrust.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/wikitrust
$ mv wikitrust WikiTrust
2e) Compile the code. There are various branches of git available,
and by default you are in the master branch, which is fine.
Look at the web documentation to see if you prefer any other
branch. If you want to go, e.g., in the development branch, do:
$ git checkout development
You can compile the code with:
$ cd WikiTrust
$ make clean ; make all ; make allopt
This creates an eval_online_wiki executable, which is what
computes text trust and origin, and author reputation, in a wiki.
The executable is called whenever someone edit the wiki, or wishes
to see a trust-colored version of a page.
================================================================
BATCH MODE:
The tool has also a batch mode, useful for analyzing the history of a
wiki, including the history of author contributions, page reversions,
quarrels, and more. Please see batch/analysis/README for more
information.