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This proposal for a "web of trust" is inspired by the mailing list thread that began with this posting by Jimbo Wales and was started by Pcb21 on 17 February 2004. Its implementation in the German Wikipedia as Wikipedia:Vertrauensnetz was started by Sansculotte and Elian on 23 July 2004. This proposed system for the English Wikipedia shares the three key ideas of Vertrauensnetz: giving users a formal way of declaring their confidence in other users, a way of seeing which users have declared their trust of a particular user, and the resulting structure of trust-relationships formed between all users (see below). The key differences between the inactive system and the presently proposed are that the inactive system relied upon the editing of a centrally-stored table and allowed formal expressions of distrust.
In March 2005 it was started on Meta as m:Web of trust and m:Vertrauensnetz by Arnomane.
The web of trust is neither a popularity contest nor a measurement or assessment of an editor's trustworthiness or value.[1] However, it provides an additional piece of information that may be useful when coming across another user for the first time. The Wikipedia user base is so large that two well-established and respected editors, concentrating on different areas of Wikipedia, may have no contact between each other for some time. Reading an editor's user page, browsing through their contributions, and reading the threads in their talk are valuable but time-consuming methods of getting to know someone. Discovering that several reputable users, or users that you have particular regard for, have expressed their trust in an editor is a strong indicator of that editor's value to Wikipedia. However, the sheer number of editors who trust a user should not be taken as a clear measurement of that user's trustworthiness: the fact that a user is trusted by dozens of suspected sockpuppets would only harm their reputation.
There are a variety of reasons to express trust in another user: you may have worked together on a proposal or article, reviewed many of their edits in articles on your watchlist, or know them personally. Liking another user should not generally be enough; trusting somebody requires being confident that their contributions are civil, constructive and of generally high quality. It is important that the trust network does not just become a popularity contest, and that the lack of an explicit statement of trust should never be interpreted as a statement of distrust. Additionally, it would be wise to consider carefully any thoughts of writing explicit statements of distrust, bearing in mind the no personal attacks policy.
- ^ The web consists simply of a collection of trust-relationships: it measures nothing. However, this information could be extracted from Wikipedia and analysed, in many different ways, to produce "trust values" for individual users. The results will vary depending on which trust metric is used, and none is officially endorsed. See the applications section for more information.