[WikiEN-l] Trusted users

Tue Feb 17 13:47:35 UTC 2004

Edits != Trustworthiness. Edits don't even accurately represent how 
active a contributor you are, as you can see from any long standing 
revert war, someone with thousands of edits but only 1 or 2% of them new 
articles, or even an article like Peerage, which has some 200 (valid) 
edits by the same user). Edits just represent how many times you type 
some text in and click a button, and I think basing adminship, a symbol 
of the community's trust in a user, solely or even automatically on how 
many times you click that button is absurd. It would help to lessen sock 
puppetry, though I don't agree that it will eliminate it. I think that 
monitoring the quality of edits would help eliminate sock puppetry more 
effectively; not too many people will wait months while making valid 
contributions to the encyclopedia on a sock puppet and keeping their 
original account active at the same time.

   Message: 6
   Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 01:38:49 +0000 (GMT)
   From: Chris Green <chris_r_green at yahoo.co.uk>
   Subject: [WikiEN-l] Trusted users

   To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
   Message-ID: <20040217013849.73205.qmail at web25107.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
   Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
   To prove seriousness (i.e. real love of Wikipedia) and
   to prevent sock puppetry why not restrict the
   allocation of trust to those users who have edited
   x(500? 1000?) times?

   I would think that this would resolve most problems.

   You might have to make an exception for certain
   current sysops who don't really edit but have proved
   their worth to the community.

   Sysop status would become automatic after x number of
   edits provided the user hadn't accumulated negative
   votes already from existing trusted users. You could
   keep the voting figures out of the public domain until
   the trigger figure is reached to prevent gamesplaying,
   since people would not know their voting score.

   Over time sysop status could be revoked if votes
   against a user became weighted too negatively. For
   questionable cases you could call a vote.

   Good behaviour conversely would inevitably lead to the
   regaining of trust as people change their votes and
   might lead to the regaining of sysop status.