Assessing trustworthiness in collaborative environments

Collaborative environments, specifically those concerning information creation and exchange, increasingly demand notions of trust and accountability. In the absence of explicit authority, the quality of information is often unknown. Using Wikipedia edit sequences as a use case scenario, we detail experiments in the determination of community-based user and document trust. Our results show success in answering the first of many research questions: Provided a user's edit history, is a given edit to a document positively contributing to its content? We detail how the ability to answer this question provides a preliminary framework towards a better model for collaborative trust and discuss subsequent areas of research necessary to broaden its utility and scope.