***delurk*** Hi all, There have been sporadic mentions of the idea of rating users to more easily detect vandalism. Has there been any serious discussion of this idea? The obvious example to follow is eBay, where the more activities you carry out in the system without negative criticism, the higher your rating. Perhaps the Wikipedia example would be counting unreverted edits.
This would trivially wipe out the problem with the new "anon users can't create new pages", namely that anon users can instantly become registered users. If the rule was instead, "users with rating < 10 can't make new pages", that problem would pretty much go away. Similarly, with the dangers of anonymous users editing pages, it could become that users with a rating less than X could not make *visible* changes to pages. If they edit a page, their change is recorded but not publicly visible. The next time a user with a suitable rating edits the page, the "pending" changes are displayed, accepted or rejected, then commited.
This follows on from the discussion of meritocracies recently. If Wikipedia is becoming a meritocracy, why not formalise the idea? Give privileges to users with ratings >100, >1000 etc. Restrict voting on admins to users with certain ratings etc.
There are obvious downsides if too many privileges are given, namely that people will be encouraged to make large numbers of meaningless edits.
Comments welcome!
Steve (Stevage on en.wiki)
On 12/8/05, Steve Bennett wiki@stevage.com wrote:
***delurk*** Hi all, There have been sporadic mentions of the idea of rating users to more easily detect vandalism. Has there been any serious discussion of this idea? The obvious example to follow is eBay, where the more activities you carry out in the system without negative criticism, the higher your rating. Perhaps the Wikipedia example would be counting unreverted edits.
This sounds interesting, but there might be some problems with collecting data. Often legitimate edits are reverted by vandals, or by POV pushers. Other purely technical data would face similar problems of having to distinguish between good and bad data.
A system whereby users could rate each other, or at least just a place where users could leave feedback about each other, might be useful.
<snip>
This follows on from the discussion of meritocracies recently. If Wikipedia is becoming a meritocracy, why not formalise the idea? Give privileges to users with ratings >100, >1000 etc. Restrict voting on admins to users with certain ratings etc.
Formalising runs the risk of creating a process that can be gamed. I think that ultimately the best way to measure someone's merit is to exercise one's own judgement, and encouraging that should be the primary element of any new process, rather than something with numbers.
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com
Hi,
This sounds interesting, but there might be some problems with collecting data. Often legitimate edits are reverted by vandals, or by POV pushers. Other purely technical data would face similar problems of having to distinguish between good and bad data.
True, but I'm presuming that you'd have to be pretty lucky to get hit by vandals more than occasionally. Probably more likely when two people get stuck in a revert war, they both suffer (maybe not a bad thing!)
Of course, you could judge the value of someone's contribution by whether or not it was reverted by a sufficiently "qualified" user. Ie, a contribution by a user rating 10 reverted by a 1000 was probably not a worthwhile contribution. The reverse is probably a vandalism revert...?
Formalising runs the risk of creating a process that can be gamed. I think that ultimately the best way to measure someone's merit is to exercise one's own judgement, and encouraging that should be the primary element of any new process, rather than something with numbers.
Currently we don't have many tools for "judgment" on users we don't know. Someone reverts your change. Was it in good faith? They have a user name. Now what...check all their other edits, their user page, their talk page (and check the history on those pages in case they're hiding something!)? Data helps to make a good judgement.
Steve
I missed this email, but I just suggested a poor man's substitute for this here:
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4221
Simply display the number of edits the user made in the article namespace next to their name. Don't change the permissions based on this number, just display it.
I believe that this is very easy to implement doesn't require endless debates on policy and would help RC patrollers a lot.
I'd also support the eBay-like user rating system, but I believe that it would take much longer to design and implement.
-- nyenyec
On 12/8/05, Steve Bennett wiki@stevage.com wrote:
Hi,
This sounds interesting, but there might be some problems with collecting data. Often legitimate edits are reverted by vandals, or by POV pushers. Other purely technical data would face similar problems of having to distinguish between good and bad data.
True, but I'm presuming that you'd have to be pretty lucky to get hit by vandals more than occasionally. Probably more likely when two people get stuck in a revert war, they both suffer (maybe not a bad thing!)
Of course, you could judge the value of someone's contribution by whether or not it was reverted by a sufficiently "qualified" user. Ie, a contribution by a user rating 10 reverted by a 1000 was probably not a worthwhile contribution. The reverse is probably a vandalism revert...?
Formalising runs the risk of creating a process that can be gamed. I think that ultimately the best way to measure someone's merit is to exercise one's own judgement, and encouraging that should be the primary element of any new process, rather than something with numbers.
Currently we don't have many tools for "judgment" on users we don't know. Someone reverts your change. Was it in good faith? They have a user name. Now what...check all their other edits, their user page, their talk page (and check the history on those pages in case they're hiding something!)? Data helps to make a good judgement.
Steve
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