[cap-talk] Killer App -- Wiki with Reputation Tracking

[Toby Murray]

I've been thinking recently about the idea that people really want a 
killer app, not an ideological sermon. With that in mind, I'd be curious 
to get people's ideas on the following idea of a "killer app".

The motivation comes from the recent debate over Wikipedia (something 
I'm not overfly familiar with). To summarise, there's been issues with 
pages that pertain to individuals being edited anonymously to contain 
defamatory remarks. In response they've disallowed anonymous users from 
being able to create new entries (but still allow them to edit existing 
entries).

I was reading an article on the above from here 
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051211-5739.html that stated "The 
fact of the matter is that as long as Wikipedia allows contributions 
from unknown people, Wikipedia cannot claim to be an accurate resource 
because a good faith effort to police content isn't the same thing as 
editorial oversight. The implication that everyone comes to Wikipedia 
with the same (neutral and honest) agenda cannot be sustained by the 
evidence in question. No, we can only talk about trends and tendencies."

I immediately took issue with this, thinking "You don't need to identify 
individual contributers. They can still be anonymous -- in the sense 
that you can't match them to an identity in the 'real world'. You just 
need to attach a reputation to each contributer, with unidentified 
contributers ("guests") having a reputation of zero. You then need to 
mark the edits with the repuation of the editor. People who view the 
page can then mark the quality of individual edits. Of course, it might 
make sense to not show the identity of an editor to a user who is 
ranking the quality of an edit, in order to ensure that the only 
information available to them when making the decision is the actual 
edit itself.

Something like this would be very implementable on top of the current 
Waterken distribution, no?
Furthermore, attaching reputation markers to identities (which are 
themselves just a set of reachable capabilities from some root), then 
provides a natural stimulus for users to make intelligent decisions 
about sharing authority.

This would allow a demonstration and (hopefully) proof against the "caps 
suck because the right to hold a cap naturally implies the right to pass 
it on" view. User's have *incentive* not to pass on caps becuase it'll 
affect their reputation, and therfore, the cridiblity of their edits and 
consequently their ability to have a meaningful effect on the wiki.

Of course, the above really amounts to adding reputation to Pelle's 
widewords implementation, which already tracks edits of the same 
capablity against the one identity (defined at the time the cap is 
created). In that sense, it's not a huge idea, but I think it might 
create some cool emergent effects.

To me, it's this sort of thing that'll be required in order to sell 
caps-on-the-web (eg. web-calculus etc.)




-- 
Toby Murray
Advanced Computer Capabilities Group
Information Networks Division
DSTO, Australia

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