[Wikipedia-l] Re: trust metrics

Mon Feb 16 01:18:47 UTC 2004

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Some possible downsides, and there are many...
> 
> 3.  People might be incentivized to create sham accounts just to give
> themselves positive feedback.

Additionally, I think, people might be incentivised to create sham 
accounts just to give negative feedback to someone else.

As has already been said, eBay doesn't have this problem because in 
order to leave feedback you have to enter a transaction with the other 
user. Edits don't make a good analogy because it's not a transaction 
between two users who can then rate each other.

I think it should indeed be made so that a "thumbs-up" from someone with 
a good rating counts more, and the ratings given by sham accounts would 
have no effect. I'm even thinking effectively giving someone positive 
feedback if someone with a negative rating gives negative feedback.

Now, I agree that having just "thumbs up", "thumbs down" and "neutral" 
makes the system pretty simple. But it's not very flexible. Example: 
Suppose I think someone is a really good contributor in the sense of the 
content they deliver, but a rather lousy person to discuss things with. 
I would want to be able to weigh these concerns against each other.

What I'm proposing is the ability to give users a rating from 0 to 10, 
or perhaps from -5 to 5. That would give me eleven levels at which to 
rate people. Every user would then have a weighted average rating, 
weighted by the rating of the raters.

I could envision something on every User page:
      +--------------------------------------+
      | User rating:      4.7                |
      | Rate this user: [ 5 (very good) |v]  |
      +--------------------------------------+

Just a suggestion.
Timwi