On 12/8/05, Steve Bennett wiki@stevage.com wrote:
***delurk*** Hi all, There have been sporadic mentions of the idea of rating users to more easily detect vandalism. Has there been any serious discussion of this idea? The obvious example to follow is eBay, where the more activities you carry out in the system without negative criticism, the higher your rating. Perhaps the Wikipedia example would be counting unreverted edits.
This sounds interesting, but there might be some problems with collecting data. Often legitimate edits are reverted by vandals, or by POV pushers. Other purely technical data would face similar problems of having to distinguish between good and bad data.
A system whereby users could rate each other, or at least just a place where users could leave feedback about each other, might be useful.
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This follows on from the discussion of meritocracies recently. If Wikipedia is becoming a meritocracy, why not formalise the idea? Give privileges to users with ratings >100, >1000 etc. Restrict voting on admins to users with certain ratings etc.
Formalising runs the risk of creating a process that can be gamed. I think that ultimately the best way to measure someone's merit is to exercise one's own judgement, and encouraging that should be the primary element of any new process, rather than something with numbers.
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com