# The following was supposedly scribed by
# Randy W. Sims
# on Thursday 22 July 2004 07:56 pm:
> A) Abuse
>
> Authors abusing the system for political statements, to sabatoge
> authors of similars modules, etc.
>
> 1) The usuall solution is a Karma type system. Number of reviews
> contributed by a reviewer. Thumbs up/down for individual reviews
> by a reviewer ("Helpfulness ratings"). Thresholds on Karma that
> automatically invoke a moderator.
Okay, so if I go on a bashing-fest and then you come through and thumbs-down
all of my reviews, I'll go through and thumbs-down your reviews too and then
bash on your modules if I haven't made it there already. Does that trigger a
karma threshold of some sort? Seems that it would be hard to detect.
How about peer-review of peer-review:
If I say that your review was bad, I think the next step is for you to defend
your review (unless it has previously gotten a thumbs-up, in which case I
must support my thumbs-down with a critique of your review.)
There may be a somewhat recursive process of attack and rebuttal here, but the
point is that a mean review is likely not going to be defended, and even if
it had received a spurious thumbs-up, a critical dismissal of said mean
review is likely to be supported rather than dismissed (thus giving weight to
the dismissal and counting further towards the thumbs-down.)
Recursion to level 3-or-so (pi) of the attack-rebuttal tree may invoke a
moderator (or just a chanting, blood-lusting crowd/mob.)
Additional weight can be given to reviewers who have posted many reviews and
received many thumbs-up, etc. But, the idea behind the tree is that it
localizes the debate to the review in question (rather than risk weighting
solely on what may have been karma generated by a flaming disagreement about
a completely different module's merits.)
Absolute dead-beats can still be identified by their failure to provide a
rebuttal or continually reaching level pi() with nonsensical or null
arguments.
--Eric
--
"You can't win. You can't break even. You can't quit."
--Ginsberg's Restatement of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics
