The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.
Wikipedia itself keeps track of these studies and openly discusses them here, which is a form of social transparency itself. However, even Wales himself have been quoted as saying that "while Wikipedia is useful for many things, he would like to make it known that he does not recommend it to college students for serious research." Indeed, the standard complaint I often hear about Wikipedia is that because of its editorial policy (anyone can edit anything), it is an unreliable source of information.
