"Michael Dale" mdale@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