On 3/11/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 3/11/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@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
A kind of "rate this user" thing, as on e-bay?
It's interesting. Just thinking off the top of my head -- would it discourage people from getting involved in disputes, or from taking up unpopular positions? If only 10 people have made positive statements about me, and I can see that if I toe the party line on [[Islam]], maybe another few people will say nice things about me, how likely am I to insist that popular editor A cite his sources? In other words, would being liked become more important than editing courageously? Or rather (because it probably is more important at the moment), would that priority become formalized?
Sarah