Analysing reputation in web communities

Abstract

We introduce a link-based approach to calculating page importance, which is based on the philosophy of moderation systems: namely, that links express approval, but the approval is modulated by the status of the person doing the linking. Motivated by observations of power-laws in link structure, and of the behaviour of weblogging communities, we introduce the Generalised HITS algorithm, which simulates the effects of a community of moderators on a topic of interest. Given a topic query, we can rate the moderators in the context of the topic, and compute from that the reputation ratings of pages, in a single query-time step. These ratings can be used to filter and present page collections interactively. Moderators, of course, may link to many topics, and central to the algorithm is a parameter to prevent topic drift, which can occur when highly-rated moderators boost the reputation of off-topic pages.