On 3/11/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It's only worth sharing if people think my opinion
is worth something
(i.e. if I rate highly enough on various "webs of trust" myself), so
you'd end up with endless intersecting webs, each one trying to
provide support for some other. This *is* the way it works in people's
minds, to be sure, but trying to formalize it would be hopeless. And
what happens when someone suddenly surprises me or let's me down? Do I
have to remove him from some list? Inform others who've copied my list
that X has fallen from favor?
You don't have to do anything. How well you maintain your network is
up to you. Other users will look at the dates when you wrote certain
statements, and take this into account. Your trust network is linked
to your person, so if you stop to maintain it completely, others will
simply judge it to be unreliable and stop using it.
Imagine that what you end up is something like [[Category:Positive
trust statements about SlimVirgin]], which contains pages such as
User:Eloquence/Positive trust/SlimVirgin/Biology
User:Dogmaster3000/Positive trust/SlimVirgin/Identity
Each of these pages would contain a signed comment as to what it
actually means, such as, "I've worked with SlimVirgin on
biology-related articles for some time, and believe she is eminently
qualified to write about bombardier beetles" or "I've met SlimVirgin
at Wikimania 2006 and can confirm that she's really slim. I cannot
comment on the other part."
Additional user categories could be made for specific disciplines,
such as [[Category:Positive trust statements about biology]]. Even if
many people would only put you in this category because they agree
with your controversial POV on bombardier beetles, the aggregate of
users in that category could be a useful group of people to write an
NPOV article on the topic together.
(Yeah, there's actually a bombardier beetle controversy.)
> Then those editors' trust databases would be
less useful than those of
> others -- itself an indication of lower reliability. I think that
> perhaps one could also capture a reasonable amount of this natural
> tendency with a fourth dimension, "people I like"
Exactly, at which point it becomes useless.
Quite to the contrary, the addition of a noisy category can reduce
noise in others. Furthermore, disclosure of friendships can help to
predict and understand bias, just like disclosure of official
affiliations.
--
Peace & Love,
Erik
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