On 12/8/05, Steve Bennett <wiki(a)stevage.com> wrote:
***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 sounds interesting, but there might be some problems with
collecting data. Often legitimate edits are reverted by vandals, or by
POV pushers. Other purely technical data would face similar problems
of having to distinguish between good and bad data.
A system whereby users could rate each other, or at least just a place
where users could leave feedback about each other, might be useful.
<snip>
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.
Formalising runs the risk of creating a process that can be gamed. I
think that ultimately the best way to measure someone's merit is to
exercise one's own judgement, and encouraging that should be the
primary element of any new process, rather than something with
numbers.
--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain(a)gmail.com