"Michael Dale" <mdale(a)wikimedia.org> wrote in message
news:4D1D31D7.9010507@wikimedia.org...
One area that I did not see much mention of in this
thread is automated
systems for reputation. Reputation systems would be useful both for user
interactions and for gauging expertise within particular knowledge
domains.
Social capital within wikikmedia projects is presently stored in
incredibly unstructured ways and has little bearing on user privileges
or how the actions of others are represented to you, and how your
actions are represented to others. Its presently based on traditional
small scale capacities of individuals to gauge social standing within
their social networks and or to read user pages.
We can see automatic reputation system emerging anytime you want to
share anything online be it making a small loan to trading used DVDs.
Sharing information should adopt some similar principals.
There has been some good work done in this area with wikitrust system (
and other user moderation / karma systems ). Tying that data into smart
interface flows that reward positive social behaviour and productive
contributions, should make it "more fun" to participate in the projects
and result in more fluid higher quality information sharing.
peace,
--michael
I think this is a fascinating idea, and one that I think meets a very
valuable criterion: being more useful to newcomers, who are used to seeing
such things on other sites, than to established editors (who will inevitably
hate it). I can see a deployment path along the lines of the Foundation
saying "we are going to enable this extension, whether or not you ask for
it. You do not have to use it, but you may not disable it.", and watching
what happens. It could well be months or years before people get over
complaining about it and it start to bed down. Of course in that time (and
generally) it needs to be immune to various forms of credit farming, which
could lead to some interesting metrics to try and ensure that sockmasters
cannot earn huge reputations by passing credit amongst their socks, while
ordinary users can be rewarded.
With ideas like this, and more generally, I think the Foundation has an
increasing role to play in fighting the growing inertia in the projects.
It's easy to say that any intervention will damage the community and so
should be avoided; but let's not forget that a (mildly) torn muscle will
heal stronger, and that the alternative is, as mentioned, complete
stagnation. It's important that the community keep evolving and innovating
as well; and if that means that some of its more inflexible members cannot
keep up and leave, so be it, as long as they are replaced by new and excited
members such that the community as a whole remains vibrant. Of course
that's a horribly difficult balance to strike, and it would be easy to kill
the golden goose. But the goose is now getting rather grey and arthritic,
and we could really do with some golden goslings right now.
--HM