On Slashdot, your public reputation boils down to one word–in the best case, that word is “Excellent.”
On Wikipedia, your readers can make more nuanced judgments–are you scholarly, helpful, or trollish?–assuming they take time to read your entire contribution history.
This informal reputation system may soon change, according to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who recently told the NYT:
“…he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site’s strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems. In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.”
Big companies are racing into “identity” and “reputation” software systems–I hope Wikipedia will take this opportunity to debut and test many open-source alternatives, if only to create prior art and save useful methods from disappearing behind a wall of preemptive copyright.* Good reputation systems promote collaboration, something the world really needs.
* I was telling Jay McCarthy about this idea–he immediately suggested another benefit from trying out multiple reputation systems: you can compare different “reputations” to see which ones make useful predictions about the future.