Jimmy Wales wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
That would prevent any incentive to create sock puppets since my
selections only affect what *I* see and what the people who trust my
judgment see (if they set their preferences accordingly).
    

I think that's really fascinating.  The incentive only arises if the
web of trust is "summed up" across different people to arrive at an
overall "score".

As long as we don't do that, there's no incentive for sock puppetry.

So, hmm, why did I want to do it that way in the first place?  Well, a
"summed up" score could be really handy for certain types of decision
making.  It could provide people with feedback on their overall
behavior.

But the real point is just to find a way for us to scale better as the
number of editors grows, to ensure that newcomers are assisted, that
vandalism is properly watched for, etc.

I like your idea a lot.

--Jimbo
At the risk of me-too-ism, I think mav's web of trust concept at least avoids most of the dangers I see in a feedback-based reputation system. That alone is wonderful progress. I'm a little more skeptical about how widely the concept would be adopted, but I'm also not that much of a Recent Changes junkie, so maybe I'm missing the appeal. Anyway, the web-of-trust system wouldn't have to be that widespread to be useful.

However, I would still avoid the pitfalls of generating a reputation score for individual users, even using this framework. Better just to let user X know that user Y trusts or distrusts X.

--Michael Snow