Edits != Trustworthiness. Edits don't even accurately represent how
active a contributor you are, as you can see from any long standing
revert war, someone with thousands of edits but only 1 or 2% of them new
articles, or even an article like Peerage, which has some 200 (valid)
edits by the same user). Edits just represent how many times you type
some text in and click a button, and I think basing adminship, a symbol
of the community's trust in a user, solely or even automatically on how
many times you click that button is absurd. It would help to lessen sock
puppetry, though I don't agree that it will eliminate it. I think that
monitoring the quality of edits would help eliminate sock puppetry more
effectively; not too many people will wait months while making valid
contributions to the encyclopedia on a sock puppet and keeping their
original account active at the same time.
Message: 6
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 01:38:49 +0000 (GMT)
From: Chris Green <chris_r_green(a)yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Trusted users
To: wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org
Message-ID: <20040217013849.73205.qmail(a)web25107.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
To prove seriousness (i.e. real love of Wikipedia) and
to prevent sock puppetry why not restrict the
allocation of trust to those users who have edited
x(500? 1000?) times?
I would think that this would resolve most problems.
You might have to make an exception for certain
current sysops who don't really edit but have proved
their worth to the community.
Sysop status would become automatic after x number of
edits provided the user hadn't accumulated negative
votes already from existing trusted users. You could
keep the voting figures out of the public domain until
the trigger figure is reached to prevent gamesplaying,
since people would not know their voting score.
Over time sysop status could be revoked if votes
against a user became weighted too negatively. For
questionable cases you could call a vote.
Good behaviour conversely would inevitably lead to the
regaining of trust as people change their votes and
might lead to the regaining of sysop status.