On the random array thing - there are a bunch of good ways to do it and since its a well-known problem, there are a number of good places to read about it, if I were rakholh I'd start with John Bentley's 'A Sample Problem' in Programming Pearls.

I read through the older comments on cert/trust levels and found that pretty much everything I said had been said before. Sadly, this has not helped me achieve the certified Dimwit level I'm striving for. And judging from the Meta article, time is running out... help!

Raph mentioned strn scorefiles which made me think that perhaps community ratings and personal ratings could be combined in some sensible way for content filtering. For the purposes of content filtering, personal ratings work well to identify authors and topics that one is already interested in whereas the community rating helps expose one to content/authors that others thought were worthwhile. Another way to look at it is that personal ratings allow a user to locally adjust the weights of the nodes in the global trust network. In a sense, one would be making a private corrections to the network to compensate for its scaling problems. Again, this adds complexity in usability and implementation which is difficult to justify without an empirical trial.

The language wars are interesting, the difficulty of using language to talk about language can drive anyone to deconstructionalism. The statement "Let's not use Journeyman because it is sexist" can be interpreted in a number of ways. It could mean "A gender-specific term does not reflect the intended gender-neutrality of the forum/community well". It could also mean "This is an inherently sexist term, people who use it are sexists". I personally don't think a word can really be inherently sexist, sexism is an attribute of people not words. So it's understandable that some could get upset at what they perceive is an accusation of sexism but it seems a little rude to jump the gun and assume that's what the comment meant - perhaps asking for some clarification would have made the whole thing simpler.

The key comment was made by the person who said 'This makes me feel unwelcome'. We really don't have to agree on whether 'Journeyman' is 'sexist' or not but it shouldn't be hard to agree that gender is not an attribute used to decide who is welcome here. And since it's not, it makes a lot of sense to use gender-neutral terms for the trust ratings.