Jimmy Wales wrote:

I am not advocating anything in this post, I'm just sharing some of my thoughts over the past few days.

I'm glad you're not advocating anything, and I trust that constitutes permission to shoot these ideas down before they get off the ground (just kidding - I'm glad to see it articulated, although I disagree with the approach).

Anyway, I'm not sure the eBay model improves much on what we have now, or even on Slashdot karma. It's fairly simplified, and the reason it works reasonably well is because it addresses a simple question - "If I make a contract with this person I've never met, can he/she be relied on to send me money or merchandise?" That's a straightforward question, and eBay feedback provides just enough information to make that decision.

Our user reputation issues, much like Slashdot, are more complex, and I don't think they should be approached by implementing metrics. If Slashdot's system is broken, I would venture that it's partly because they oversimplified it. The simplicity of voting somebody's feedback up or down is appealing, but leaves behind little useful information for others.

I also don't think the eBay model translates to Wikipedia. There's less incentive to give positive feedback, and a bigger crowd willing to give negative feedback. Also, without transaction-based limitations, you have less restriction on the negativity. I would expect many users that you or I might consider very positive contributors to have *negative* reputations, unless we set the zero-point so low as to make the system meaningless. I consider this probable even if we devise a way to weight the scores. But basically, I have concerns about generating any kind of reputation score, because it provides no context for the feedback that went into it.

Some possible downsides, and there are many...

2. People might be dissuaded from taking controversial and brave

stands, if it's going to get them some negative feedback.

I think this is a huge problem for any kind of formalized feedback system, especially given the purposes of Wikipedia. Wikipedia could turn into a place where the content is largely a tasteless, watery gruel because everyone is on pins and needles to avoid provoking negative responses. In my opinion, using oversimplified feedback is a terrible way to promote NPOV. Neutrality can be achieved by addressing controversial issues and finding a balanced way to present them; it can't be achieved by avoiding the controversy altogether.

I don't believe the system is broken. At most, maybe we need a little more informational material in the Wikipedia namespace. Specifically, something that presents ideas of how to find out information about any given user, so people can assess that user's reputation for themselves. We have user pages and user talk pages. People can check the links to a user page for posts the user has signed. People can check user contributions, and a few diff-checks of a user's more substantial contributions can give anyone a perspective on the quality of that user's edits. It's a little work, but if knowing more about another user is worth it to you, it should be worth putting forth the effort.

I also think even an experiment can be dangerous, because really, there's no such thing as an experiment here. The only way to set one up is by getting the community involved with it, and nobody will participate if they don't see the results. Once they see results, some people will insist on using those results, even if we *know* that the information is misleading. And the only way to stop the experiment would be for Jimbo to make a very divisive decision to stop it. As a prediction, I believe an experiment would end up as one of two things: largely unutilized, like WikiMoney accounts, or dysfunctional like Slashdot.

--Michael Snow