On 3/11/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 3/11/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Editors who've been around for a while do this already. I know which editors I can trust; what their strengths and weaknesses are; who tends to engage in OR; who's great at citing sources; whose edits never need to be checked.
Then that seems like knowledge worth sharing.
It's only worth sharing if people think my opinion is worth something (i.e. if I rate highly enough on various "webs of trust" myself), so you'd end up with endless intersecting webs, each one trying to provide support for some other. This *is* the way it works in people's minds, to be sure, but trying to formalize it would be hopeless. And what happens when someone suddenly surprises me or let's me down? Do I have to remove him from some list? Inform others who've copied my list that X has fallen from favor?
Formalizing this wouldn't work, because you'd get a ton of editors adding others to their "web of trust" on the basis of agreeing with their POV alone.
Then those editors' trust databases would be less useful than those of others -- itself an indication of lower reliability. I think that perhaps one could also capture a reasonable amount of this natural tendency with a fourth dimension, "people I like"
Exactly, at which point it becomes useless.