[Wikiquality-l] Implicit vs Explicit metadata

[mike.lifeguard]

Please forgive if this is ground covered previously; I've only just
subscribed to this list.

I wonder how this would apply to my home wiki (en.wikibooks) and other wikis
where editing is slow. Wikipedia has a constant deluge of edits from vandal
IPs up the "editing hierarchy" through to the most trusted editors.
Wikibooks, however, has a far smaller group of regular contributors,
(almost) all of which have a high reputation. Nonetheless, modules are often
untouched for weeks or months at a time - this is simply the nature of the
textbook-writing beast.

As I understand it (which could be totally off-base), this algorithm
requires editing of the text to determine trust. So what happens when the
text isn't edited for months at a time, as is the case with many of our
books?

In the absence of editing, it seems like explicit metadata wins out, since
there *is* no implicit metadata to use (or at least, much much less).