First results from an investigation into the validity of developer reputation derived from wiki articles and source code

The internal quality of software is often neglected by developers for various reasons like time pressure or a general dislike for certain activities. Yet internal quality is important to speed up development and to keep software maintainable. We present a way to use reputation systems to improve the internal quality of software by putting artifacts like wiki articles and source code under their control. Specifically, we show that reputation scores derived from such artifacts reflect actual reputation in the developer community using data from a work group wiki and an open source project.