Proceedings of the 2nd Joint WICOW/AIRWeb Workshop on Web Quality

WebQuality 2012 was held on April 16, 2012 as the second joint WICOW/AIRWeb workshop. The first event in the joint workshop series was WebQuality 2011. Previously, WICOW (International Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web) workshops have addressed information credibility on the Web in 4 previous editions (2007--2010), while AIRWeb (Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web) installments have covered adversarial information retrieval issues in 5 previous editions (2005--2009). On the one hand, the joint workshop aimed to cover the more blatant and malicious attempts that deteriorate web quality---such as spam, plagiarism, or various forms of abuse---and ways to prevent them or neutralize their impact on information retrieval. On the other hand, it also provided a venue for exchanging ideas on quantifying finer-grain issues of web content quality, credibility, trust and author reputation, and modeling them in online information retrieval. For an open publication platform such as the World Wide Web, content quality is a central issue. Low publishing barriers lead to very limited quality control, which results in the proliferation of mistaken, unreliable, and sometimes outright intentionally misleading information. Low quality (textual or multimedia) content can have detrimental effects on users, especially in the light of the ever-increasing role the Web plays in our daily lives. Content quality challenges call for technology that facilitates judging the trustworthiness of content and assessing the accuracy of the information. Some of these challenges and technologies are not fundamentally new: search engine spam is over a decade old now, and content credibility problems have received a fair share of research attention in the past few years as well. However, novel web content quality issues abound as various forms of adversarial behavior gain in sophistication, and as new groups of users and web platforms (such as social networking services or mobile application ecosystems) emerge.