When thinking about this idea, don't assume what form it would take. Bottom line, if it takes a few days to gain enough power to do serious vandalism, engaging in serious vandalism would not be fun, but a stone drag since all the rigamarole (which for a first time user could possibly take the form of learning about the wiki) will have to be gone through again. Faster then the first time, but still time consuming.
Fred
On Oct 22, 2005, at 10:11 PM, Alphax wrote:
I'm not sure if I like the idea that one of us suggested (that users gain "experience points" like in a MUD) because it is just another way for newbies to be discriminated against even for good faith edits. But perhaps a "edit faith quality level" could be maintained for each user and it would take only say 5 days with at least 5 good faith edits or 50 good faith edits for a new user to be ramped up to 100%.
We also have our fair share of clueless newbies; such a meta- moderation system would inevitably disadvantage them, and it would be very easy for experienced "problem users" to game the system.
Presumably it would be easy to profile the behaviour of an experienced user who creates a sockpuppet vs an inexperienced user who creates a new account for the first time. And based on matching this profile, the software would delay the increase of "edit faith level". This might delay legitimate good faith sockpuppets for a few more days or so before their "faith quality level" would reach 100%, but would help keep control on shortterm sockpuppets created specifically to be used for bad faith edits.
Show me a program that can work out if a given program will terminate or not and I will show you a program to detect and block trolls, vandals and sockpuppets :)