[Campaigns-l] Short sweet critique

[Becky Blackham]

Hello, Steven.

Fascinating!  Thank you so very much for the explanation of "trust 
metric" -- I was quite surprised (even though I lived in the classified 
community for a time).  I'm happy to have more to absorb and synthesize 
from your further explanation of CMS.  I want to present my thoughts 
compatibly to the site's collaborators and to understand the tools as 
well as possible.

The distinction between fact and intelligence, your definitions for 
each, are all very helpful. It seems the c-wiki (did you call it that?) 
we are using has the useful quality of being very efficiently revisable. 
There's both speed and ease of access to revise and the potential 
massively parallel collaboration to do as much work as required. (I am 
staying out of the value/"trust" dimension for now).

I do see that the attempt to employ an efficient value assigning system 
layers another set of problems over the problem intended to be solved. 
Some thought needed on that for this project... :-)

Becky


stevertigo wrote:
> --- Becky Blackham <bblackham at san.rr.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> Steven, I appreciate this response because I am none to clear about the 
>> meaning of the term "wiki," and the programming, or types of 
>> programming, that enable the sites named with some variant of "wiki." 
>>     
> ....
>   
>> It remains to be seen if that vision of a net driven, new participatory politic will
>>     
> be adopted 
>   
>> by those wishing to work on CampaignWikia. 
>>     
> ....
>   
>> Would you explain what you mean by "trust metric," below?
>>     
>
>
> Hi Becky.
>
> Note that CMS itself is just a term to refer to information management by humans for
> humans, and humans use different types of information. Information on Wikipedia may be
> very much like 'facts' and 'data' but other functions might require different kind of
> information. Craigslist presents information which is less 'fact' than it is
> 'intelligence'  regarding whats going on, whose selling what, etc. If we really want to
> take the CMS concept to its full abstraction, we could even call newspapers CMS's, were
> the system is a human one, and the sofware is simply a mode or tool. 
>
> Anything political would naturally imply some notion of active data - intelligence on
> whats going on currently.  Whatever other kind of data, some of which may not be
> compatible with the notion of openness and free information. Politics tends to be
> cliquish, wheras Encyclopedia writing tends to be not. Its similar to my critique of
> Wikinews in that newspapers typically have some editorial structure, collaborate in
> secret on stories, have confidential sources, have attribution, etc. etc. Again, form
> and function.
>
> Thats out of the way. "Trust metric" refers to the usage of programmed application of
> mathematical formulas to derive values (metrics) which can be useful for ascertaining
> the validity, authority, legitimacy, ("trust") of persons. We generally make such
> judgments based on other real life factors, many of which are not available to us on
> the web, and because the web allows for more massively parallel communications, the
> term "trust metric" implies some way to make collective personal judgments in a way
> thats both efficient and quantified.
>
> The part of just making judgments ("rating") is often just one side of the coin, though
> that alone might be good enough, as people could simply agree to abide by the numbers. 
> The other half of course is using such ratings in a way which makes whatver your doing
> more efficient. In the case of Wikipedia that typically means that higher ratings would
> translate into greater voting power in settling disputes. The idea is that you have to
> spend less time training or curbing newbies, and explaining yourself on the talk pages,
> and more time editing. 
>
> Of course such usage of such data would be controversial, as it would seem to
> contradict the notion that all editors are automatically equal.' Such system would have
> to be "seeded" based on some initial personal judgements, and would carry the assumtion
> that those of higher rank would in fact be in agreement on the fundamentals, and not
> skewed toward a particular bias.  We would hope that members of the legal profession,
> for example would strive toward more universal ethics and principles, but history shows
> that practitioners often have other biases, and principle itself is only cited where
> its convenient.
>
> In other words, the notion that value can be programmed and thus somewhat automated
> (ie. bypass discussion, be taken as fact) has the serious problem that any inherent
> flaws would show themselves as complexities in their own right, over and above whatever
> problem its supposed to solve to begin with.
>
> Steven
>
>
>
>
>
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