On 3/11/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
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?
You don't have to do anything. How well you maintain your network is up to you. Other users will look at the dates when you wrote certain statements, and take this into account. Your trust network is linked to your person, so if you stop to maintain it completely, others will simply judge it to be unreliable and stop using it.
Imagine that what you end up is something like [[Category:Positive trust statements about SlimVirgin]], which contains pages such as
User:Eloquence/Positive trust/SlimVirgin/Biology User:Dogmaster3000/Positive trust/SlimVirgin/Identity
Each of these pages would contain a signed comment as to what it actually means, such as, "I've worked with SlimVirgin on biology-related articles for some time, and believe she is eminently qualified to write about bombardier beetles" or "I've met SlimVirgin at Wikimania 2006 and can confirm that she's really slim. I cannot comment on the other part."
Additional user categories could be made for specific disciplines, such as [[Category:Positive trust statements about biology]]. Even if many people would only put you in this category because they agree with your controversial POV on bombardier beetles, the aggregate of users in that category could be a useful group of people to write an NPOV article on the topic together.
(Yeah, there's actually a bombardier beetle controversy.)
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.
Quite to the contrary, the addition of a noisy category can reduce noise in others. Furthermore, disclosure of friendships can help to predict and understand bias, just like disclosure of official affiliations.