16 Jun 2002 (updated 16 Jun 2002 at 22:54 UTC)
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Regarding the trust metric
I was surprised to become a journeyer already, after only two
journeyers certed me as a journeyer, and one of the "seed"
trusted masters certed me as an apprentice. Not that I
dispute it; I maintain three open source projects now and
have published / contributed to others in the past. Still,
it does seem generous, so I looked around at some other
accounts to get an idea of how it works overall.
What I found is that it's generous for everybody. If the
goal is to encourage activity within the community, i.e. if
mod_virgule "feeds" on this activity, then it is in
mod_virgule's interest to stroke a person with a nice
inflated cert. That's fine - as long as we take it for what
it is and keep it real.
I will give another example besides myself, because
sometimes ya gotta stir the sh*te. I see
bytesplit has recieved
about a dozen
apprentice certs and two journeyer certs - one of which is a
self-certification; the other of which is by someone
bytesplit certified as a master. I assume the
self-certification doesn't count. (The other person,
whytheluckystiff, is
certified by many as
a journeyer. Although I don't know him, that looks about
right.) So as far as I can tell, based solely on
whythelucystiff's vote, bytesplit gained journeyer status.
I am not going to come down on bytesplit. He just came to
my attention because he makes the headlines a lot. In fact,
I'm tempted to cert him as an apprentice. Outwardly, he
does appear to have an interest in becoming a good
programmer, and also when he comments on an article, it is
usually a positive contribution. His diary paints a
different picture though. bytesplit, I
don't know whether this is a game to you or whether it comes
from genuine interest in open source; either way, if you
present the same image in your diary as you present
elsewhere, you'll be more successful.
One more example, although I don't remember who it was: last
week I saw a diary entry that said "I'm no longer an active
participant in the open source community, and have not been
in 18 months. Please re-think your ratings with this in
mind." Perhaps there should be a way to decline a
certification vote which you think you haven't earned?
freshmeat has restored the comment that I mentioned,
in which I talked about how I hoped to extend this
software on Unix. I didn't ask them to restore it.
Perhaps its
temporary disappearance was due to a technical glitch rather
than an overzealous editor. Anyway freshmeat, you are
helping me reach my audience, and you're doing it for free.
Thanks.