[Wikipedia-l] Webs of trust are a better idea (was: trust metrics)

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 12:46:16AM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Brion wrote:
> >On the contrary it's very easy to game: create a bunch of 
> >sock puppet accounts to give each other feedback. On E-Bay 
> >you'd have to go to the trouble of faking some auctions to 
> >yourself, but nothere... 
> 
> Yes - that would be bad. Here is a simple solution that goes along with what I
> thought trust metrics would do:
> 
> There are a bunch of people I trust on Wikipedia - I never check their edits
> for vandalism, bad edits, or overt POV because, in my experience, they have
> very rarely if ever done any of those things. There are others who I trust in
> the same way expect in some categories and on particular articles. And then
> there are the people who I don't trust at all. 
> 
> What I would like is the ability to say that I trust user x. Presto! Edits by
> user x are either no longer displayed in a special recent changes list that
> only I can see or their edits are turned into small gray text on my regular RC
> list (I like this second option better). Once a category system is up and
> running I would like to refine that for some users (who I do not trust only
> when they edit certain categories of articles).  I would also like the ability
> to explicitly say that I don't trust somebody - their edits on RC would be
> bolded. 
> 
> Then to create a web of trust I would like to tell MediaWiki that I trust the
> opinions of user x. Presto! Any edits by a user on user x's white list will be
> either removed from my special RC list or made small and grayed out on my
> regular RC list (and watchlist for that matter). 

There is very serious problem with this approach - the trust is not transitive
at all, especially wrt POV issues.