On 2/9/11 11:44 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
That'd actually be pretty useful, although I'm looking at it from a slightly different perspective. It would be excellent to have an easy way of locating and identifying those noted as say, good copyeditors, for when you have something that needs being done.
The problem, as I see it, is that this risks making things far too complicated. One of the criticisms levelled at Wikipedia is that the community and policy layout is far too complex. If we start adding in myriad different "statuses" for editors, we're shooting ourselves in the foot.
To my mind, there are two competing principles of usability. These examples are focused on web-application usability but the principles apply here.
One school of thought says that "nothing should ever be more than two clicks away". For years this was the model Yahoo employed, for instance and the homepage became a mass of links.
The second school (and the one I subscribe to) is that it's okay for users to click 20 times to get what they need done *as long as those clicks make sense are are natural*.
Complexity isn't necessarily the enemy. Sometimes the lack of it is. It's okay to make edge-case or undesirable tasks complicated, for instance, if not doing so makes the primary use cases more complicated.
Reputation systems needn't be complicated; they can easily be background processes. Consider Quora's mechanisms for highlighting "best answers".
One thing I've been thinking about is the idea of "self-identification". If a person could self-identify as a newbie looking for help, for instance, or as someone who is open to helping other users, we could "badge" them as such.
There are lots of ways this can be done, which is why I've held off creating a fully-designed system to bring to the community and have instead been thinking about angles.