On 3/11/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Then that seems like knowledge worth sharing.
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.
Then those editors' trust databases would be less useful than those of others -- itself an indication of lower reliability. I think that perhaps one could also capture a reasonable amount of this natural tendency with a fourth dimension, "people I like".
Who's going to decide whose "web of trust" can be trusted?
Nobody.
Which gets me back to the original question: who is going to do the verifying?
Everyone.