[Wikipedia-l] Re: web of trust

Sat Jul 24 13:33:25 UTC 2004

Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

> Just in case some other wikipedias are interested, too:
> In the german wikipedia we started an experimental web of trust 
> yesterday. It works by the "what links here functionality". A user who 
> wants to participate creates a page [[User:Name/trust]] and lists there 
> all the people he trusts in the form [[User:Otheruser/trust]]. By 
> visiting a trust page (existing or not) and clicking on "what links 
> here" you can see which people are trusting this user.

This is asking for trouble. Although you state that "even if you're not 
on this list, that doesn't mean people find you untrustworthy", people 
are inevitably going to feel that way. I think this gives the community 
of experienced users too powerful a tool to make newbies feel unwelcome 
and have them leave. (I suppose this isn't as much of a problem on the 
German Wikipedia because you already do that on a regular basis.)

To counteract this, a lot of newbies would be encouraged to flood other 
people's User talk pages with requests to be added to their trust list. 
I can already foresee the annoyance of it.

Lastly, there's also the lot of us who don't really care much about the 
other contributors and just go their own way. They wouldn't want to 
create a trust page because they wouldn't know whom to trust and whom to 
mistrust, but they would be thought of as anti-social jerks who don't 
trust anybody if they don't.

Timwi