Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Trust network (section)

==Applications==

The network can help to reveal the extent to which Wikipedia contributors are trusted by their peers. This information might serve several purposes: for instance, as an indicator when considering to what extent the Wikipedia content added by a user can be trusted, when taking part in [[Help:Recent changes|recent changes patrol]], or when considering a [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship|request for adminship]]. 

The network itself can be analysed using a [[trust metric]] to rate individual users. There are very many different ways to do this, which will produce quite different results, and it is important to note that no metric is endorsed by this proposal. The simplest trust metric is to count the number of users who trust the rated user, but this system is vulnerable to attack (for instance, the use of [[Wikipedia:Sock puppetry|sockpuppet]] accounts to trust oneself). Another is to count how many links there are in the chain of trust between yourself and another user: if I trust A, who trusts B, who trusts C, and this is the shortest path from myself to C, then C is three links away from me. I might decide that I explicitly trust anybody one link away from me, and implicitly trust anybody up to three links away. This is very different to the previous case: the measurement is personal, not absolute, and will not be affected by sock puppetry.

More advanced metrics, most famously [[Advogato]]'s [https://web.archive.org/web/20170627230829/http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html innovative trust metric], are attack-resistant, but may require a core "seed" of users trusted by the metric itself. Different choices for this seeding will produce different results, and different users will decide on completely distinct seed choices: there is therefore no prospect of this producing an official editor rating system through Wikipedia using this system.