On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:42 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Agree - trust scores are likely to be divisive and easily gamed. I do not think "trust score league tables" will help the project.
However as they are also good ways to spot problems and see the "reliability profile" of an article on review, perhaps some way might be found to make some of their results available, in some limited manner? Admin only??
On the assumption admins are trusted anyway so they don't have such a vested interest in numbers, but they might be interested in problem editorship.
The other view is if you can see the aging or trust profile of the article, that's all you need. low trust-score users may simply be legitimate but inexperienced, bold and reverted, etc. There are other ways to ID problem editors, and if you need to know who wrote a specific sentence you can always use WikiBlame to check the history.
So overall I would say you don't need to publish trust scores of users, and even telling a user their own trust score is merely a toehold into self promotion/gaming at best. People should edit, not be encouraged to keep scorecards.....
FT2
Playing devils advocate, isn't there far too little information available about your average editor? How do you determine at a glance the reputation of an editor whose edits you are reviewing, or with whom you are having a conversation? Further, since the full history dump is publicly available and the given algorithm is just one of many related measures that could be computed, is it pointless to try and stop the information from being released? Lastly, in the interest of transparency should the information not be made available? Shouldn't the goal be to create an algorithm that can't be gamed? It may actually be the case that this one is not very subject to manipulation. The authors are very astute and it would take an awful lot of effort.