I tend to think that this may not be a huge problem... but "the proof is in the pudding": our server is now up and running, we are experimenting with some wikis, why don't we try to color a dump of the Norwegian wikipedia and see how the result looks like?  I am sure it won't be perfect, and the reasons you cite are the reasons why the tool actually never displays people's reputation value (we don't want visitors to read too much into it).  But perhaps the tool will still enable the easy visual detection of recent changes, and unvalidated changes, and perhaps contributors will find this useful.

I downloaded the latest dump I could find (June 2008), and I will color it right away.
I am not sure we will install all the extensions required for it to look pretty, and images may or may not work, so this will be a purely experimental setting (all of these things would work if we colored the real Norwegian Wikipedia, it's just that I am not sure I can find the time in these days to install all required extensions).  Still, it will give you an idea.

(I haven't implemented yet the code to bring up to date the trust of long-unchanged pages; I will do it).

Luca


2008/8/31 John Erling Blad <john.erling.blad@jeb.no>
At no.wp there are now questions about establishing thrust for users
within small or closed groups where it is no or very little knowledge
outside the group. Such situations will occur very rarely on english, or
one of the other large wikis, yet it can occur very easily on smaller
communities. It can although happen on a wiki with a large community if
the given area of knowledge is sufficiently small.

An example is something like tetraploid salmon in fish farming
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_farming), where the english community
might be able to check if this is meaningful and parhaps also the
norwegian community, irish community and chilean community, but what
about the polish community? Will they figure out the relations? Will a
editor writing about this gain correct trust? Note that the places are
known for salmon fish farming, someone in the polish community might now
about this because there are fish farming in Poland - just not with salmon.

I believe the system in the mean will produce valuable information, but
it will not be very accurate without additional measures.

John

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