I work with some of the de.wiki editors on plants, and they're always a bit surprised at how scattered we are at en.wiki for all the articles we have, and they just seem to have far fewer outliers in every area than we have on en.wiki. Heck, they can even get away with common names instead of scientific names for organisms. This isn't just a function of the homogeneity of the language in the area, because it is not homogeneous, there are as many regions, hundreds of years (thousands in their case) of settlements, disturbances, migrations, wars, and interlopers that impacted the language as much as English--it's that de.wiki is different from en.wiki. Different in a way that apparently allows something like formalized common names and confidence networks to work for them.
In essence it *is* a popularity contest as Sarah suggests. I have no interest in learning how to expand my popularity or add others to my list. Popularity contests among editors and administrators already make for problems, especially in all the nationalistic brouhahas. Also, the more things like this, user boxes, confidence networks that en.wiki has, the more ways to distinguish an ordinary editor from every one else, an editor who justs drops in sometimes to edit from the masses who spend chunks of time every day editing, the more en.wiki becomes a stratified society.
Less ways to stratify editors is better than more ways, imo.
Also en.wiki already informally does this, as others have pointed out. I know who to ask to edit an article, who not to ask, what editors I can ignore when they do edits on my watch list, what editors I can't ignore. Other editors send people to me with questions or issues, people ask me to settle disputes on certain issues, and I know what editors I can go to for the same thing. It takes a lot of time to learn this about other editors, formalizing it, I believe, might remove this necessary time and put new editors into doing it sooner than they really can do it. I loved realizing a few weeks ago that I could and should ask my favorite pop teen editor to work on an article about an african surgeon. I liked it when an editor I barely work with copied a new editor's post to my talk page, knowing I could answer the questions in it.
Some things take time. Starting out with a network for editors to fill out, assign people to, will wind up like user boxes--a gadget, rather than a community building tool. New editors will spend an incredible amount of time on it, without any real understanding, without really gaining any insight into how wikipedia works, how the community works, without really becoming a part of their networks. It will consume time and energy that could be spent really becoming part of the existing networks.
En.wiki just isn't that big on formalizing things, also, so implementing it probably would not occur.
KP
On 3/11/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/11/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I'd just dread the effect it would have on RfA... It's pretty much a certainty that you'll see "'''Oppose''' Not enough people trusting" on an RfA within a week of this becoming widely used. Even worse will be the "Trusts too many people", "Trusts too few people", "Trusts User-I-don't-like, so must have bad judgement", etc. opposes.
"Trusted by untrustworthy people." We'd end up being deliberately horrible to certain editors in the hope they wouldn't add our names to their "web of trust." ;-D
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