On 0, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com scribbled:
On 06/08/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
The most exciting ones I can think of:
#We can scrap the 'newest 1%' part of semi-protection. Instead of waiting 4 days, write 4 articles! #We can scrap editcountitis - this reputation metric may still not be ideal, but I suspect the metric will reflect the value of one's contributions *a heckuva* lot better than # of edits.
These two, and a few others, get into the problem that - as currently implemented - the value of the metric is concealed. In order to use a lot of these implementations we;d have to make a conscious decision to publicise that value, which just gives something new to game.
As I think another has pointed out, if it is visible at all, the value is there. Leaving aside that it could all be done outside of WP by a bot author - spider a user's contrib page, grab each page's revision history, and run the algorithm on it. It'd be slower than if everything were being done on the WMF servers, and would probably rule out using it in interactive applications, but you could still do it - even if the only indication were some HTML tags indicating font colors, one could still extract the information. Perhaps blue = high reputation, or whatever.
The first could be done without publicising the value, but it does lead to two negative effects:
a) it's possible for someone to "go down" a grade in our trust system, which isn't currently possible and has interesting implications
It formalizes in a sense what we already do as a community, I think. Community-banned users are the lowest grade in our trust system, anonymous AOL and school IPs a step up, random residential anon IPs still another step, oft-blocked users a little higher (obviously there's overlap in these sets - if I said they were exclusive, no doubt someone would raise the example of that anon IP with multiple RfA offers!), and so on and so forth. Some of these levels are explicit, like with blocking and semi-protection, and others are not, like the increased scrutiny users with a red userpage link apparently are favored with.
b) people don't know where they stand, and we can't tell them where they stand or exactly how to improve. It's a complex model - as things stand now, we can just say "wait a few days", and even when it was the irregular newest-1% we could still say "oh, three or four days, should be okay". However, it's going to muddy the waters a lot if we have to say "make some substantive contributions and hope the computer likes the look of you"...
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- Andrew Gray
I think the harder to predict nature could be turned into an argument for it; I understand the FA people have trouble with the article of the day even when semi-protected because trolls register sleeper accounts and just wait for a boring day to go vandalize. It's a very low cognitive burden to simply create some random accounts and forget about them until you want to vandalize; if they are forced to invest in them a little by improving articles, then the burden rises. For good people, this isn't so much of an issue: presumably a good person registers an account precisely to do what this would encourage them to do.
-- gwern monarchist SGC 127 NAVELEXSYSSECENGCEN Z7 CACI POCSAG Ti cybercash Infrastructure