The original meaning of "trust metric" is from the PublicKeyInfrastructure world. The literature is littered with papers proposing one trust metric or another. None of them work very well. In fact, building a PublicKeyInfrastructure with any kind of robustness or trustworthiness is a very hard problem, perhaps even destined to be a FailedDream.

Two other concepts related to the classical sense of "trust metric" may be relevant: MattBlaze's PolicyMaker system for evaluating trust assertions in a distributed setting, and the WebOfTrust from PrettyGoodPrivacy. The latter is ''not'' set up for any kind of automatic evaluation, incidentally, which confuses people, because most everything else is.

When I created AdvoGato (in part to test out the spiffy new trust metrics I had designed for my original goal of building a better PKI), I adopted the phrase "trust metric" without modification, even though what it actually measures is quite different. In the case of AdvoGato, it is used simply to determine membership in a community, in this case the community of FreeSoftware developers.

The fact that I'm seeing it applied to other areas such as SlashDot's moderation is rather interesting from a memetics point of view :)

''I originally wrote this text on MeatballWiki. Since there really is a parallel discussion going on, it seems like a strong example motivating InterWiki.''

-- RaphLevien

	 :	Question: Where would you have the most fun discussing this, Raph? Here or there? Discussion should be directed likewise. -- SunirShah

	 :	''I don't know, I'm too much of a WikiNewbie to really figure this out. A koan: How do you refactor across wikis?''

	 : [Here's how: use wikiwikiweb.net and link them all together!]

	 :	How do you refactor within a wiki? You move the appropriate content over and place a link.

	 :	[Marketing tripe follows] Most of this wiki is methodology/software engineering. All of MeatballWiki is online culture and community. But the real difference to you would be a larger audience and bigger database here versus a more focused audienced, less entrenched feel there. Also, technically, MeatballWiki is setup better for certain kinds of discussion. We have RFC links and Cliff recently added the Advogato "InterWiki" link. Anyway, as always, pick the funnest. -- ss