***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)