WikiRep: Digital Reputation in Virtual Communities

We present a framework for applying digital reputations to collaborative environments, where multiple authors contribute to the same document. In our mechanism readers evaluate a single document, and reputation data derived from the feedbacks affect multiple authors and document versions. The digital reputation encourages contribution and provides motivation for active participation, leading to better quality of the content and to better user experience. Our approach is applicable to user-managed communities, distributed moderation systems, and other collaborative contexts. The underlying ideas of our scheme are: separate ratings for different versions of the same document, inheritance of previous ratings for newer versions, and appropriate allocation of credit to versions and authors. We describe in detail both the algorithms used to compute reputations, and our implementation, WikiRep, a reputation-enabled Wiki application.