[WikiEN-l] User ratings

Wed Dec 7 23:03:15 UTC 2005

***delurk***
Hi all,
  There have been sporadic mentions of the idea of rating users to more
easily detect vandalism.  Has there been any serious discussion of this
idea?  The obvious example to follow is eBay, where the more activities
you carry out in the system without negative criticism, the higher your
rating.  Perhaps the Wikipedia example would be counting unreverted
edits.

This would trivially wipe out the problem with the new "anon users can't
create new pages", namely that anon users can instantly become
registered users.  If the rule was instead, "users with rating < 10
can't make new pages", that problem would pretty much go away.
Similarly, with the dangers of anonymous users editing pages, it could
become that users with a rating less than X could not make *visible*
changes to pages.  If they edit a page, their change is recorded but not
publicly visible.  The next time a user with a suitable rating edits the
page, the "pending" changes are displayed, accepted or rejected, then
commited.

This follows on from the discussion of meritocracies recently.  If
Wikipedia is becoming a meritocracy, why not formalise the idea?  Give
privileges to users with ratings >100, >1000 etc.  Restrict voting on
admins to users with certain ratings etc.

There are obvious downsides if too many privileges are given, namely
that people will be encouraged to make large numbers of meaningless
edits.

Comments welcome!

Steve (Stevage on en.wiki)