Comments on: Wikipedia as a reputation system

By: James Governor

James Governor — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:14:17 +0000

Sadly wikipedia is not interested in emergent authority. As Jimmy Wales told me if you want an entry in wikipedia “get better PR” – it counts links from offline journals…. as authorities, but not web people.

By: Ajit Jaokar

Ajit Jaokar — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:20:01 +0000

Thanks Andre for your insightful comments. Often when I put out a blog like this – it is all very conceptual and experimental – so I am glad you like it and I like your feedback as well. kind rgds Ajit

By: André Luís

André Luís — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:01:20 +0000

I could see this work if Wikipedia goes through the trouble of implementing a trustworthy algorithm for this. Simply presenting the top N contributors for any page woudn’t cut it, as it could probably be played. Maybe if they included a delay, say a week, would give time for any vandalism attack to be reverted by the ever-watching wikipedians. Then you’d be able to rely on the information of said group of hcards.
Still, it’s a very valid idea. This could be done by including hCards with one rel-tag (relating to the subject of the page), pointing towards the profile of the user with the property UID. (this points to a page with a far more detailed hcard of the user) The usage of rel=”me” is arguable…
But if you could summarize the whole set of rel-tags in the user profile page, you could even share the reputation by consolidating identity urls! With crossed rel=”me” links you could do this.
Interesting concept… Microformats provide the vocabulary to get it across, but wikipedia needs to put in the trust part.