On 3/11/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 3/11/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
I worry that the formal verification thing will take us down the Citizendium road.
Let's think about expressing trust in different ways, of which recognizing a person's credentials is just one. We could build a voluntary "web of trust" where editors recognize others as:
- being the person they claim to be, including but not limited to
claims they make about themselves, such as credentials (identity)
- being knowledgeable in a particular subject area or possessing a
particular skill (ability)
- acting in good faith, in recognition of their limitations, and in
awareness of Wikipedia's policies and practices (reliability) ...
Such a web of trust model does not require technical changes. It could be built using user subpages, similar to the German "Vertrauensnetzwerk":
Editors who've been around for a while do this already. I know which editors I can trust; what their strengths and weaknesses are; who tends to engage in OR; who's great at citing sources; whose edits never need to be checked.
Formalizing this wouldn't work, because you'd get a ton of editors adding others to their "web of trust" on the basis of agreeing with their POV alone. Who's going to decide whose "web of trust" can be trusted? Which gets me back to the original question: who is going to do the verifying?
I don't know much about the German Wikipedia but from everything I've heard it's overly expert-dominated; this shows in the reaction of German Wikipedians when they arrive here and are suddenly expected to cite their sources no matter how much they think they know about a topic. I would hate to see the English Wikipedia head in the direction of taking people's word for things just because they're part of someone's "web of trust."
Sarah