Sheldon Rampton wrote:
Personally, I think Wikipedia should try to move away from deterrence strategies like bans, IP blocks and arbitration committees, and toward a reputation-management system like they have at Slashdot or Kuro5hin or eBay. A reputation-management system combines rewards with punishments. What's missing from Wikipedia's system is any kind of reward for GOOD behavior.
Well, there's no mechanized system, but there certainly is old fashioned human "reputation".
I'm not opposed, in the abstract, to reputation management systems of the type that you're talking about, other than to say that they are notoriously difficult to design well, notoriously easy to game-play, and generally lack the subtlety that old-fashioned human reputation has.
Different people do different things and gain positive reputation in many different ways. Some spend a lot of time writing original material on uncontroversial subjects. Some spend a lot of time writing here, about policy. Some do a lot of copy editing. Some sit on VotesForDeletion. Some look out for vandalism. Some spend a lot of time writing original material on *controversial* subjects, a risky and dangerous avocation for reputation. :-)
It's hard to imagine any sort of mechanized system which could begin to capture all the nuances.
On the other hand, reputation management systems can scale to a much larger size than the human system. Maybe.
There are sysops who I don't even know, who I've never spoken to, not in private email, not on the wiki, not on the mailing list.
A couple of people wrote to me with probably justified complaints about my appointments to the committees that I overlooked some very good people who I don't happen to know.
--Jimbo