Web Of Trust

see esp MeatballWiki:WebOfTrust - In Collaborative Hypermedia, users are ideally given a large degree of freedom to add, edit, and remove content. Overly strict security mechanisms not only discourage free cooperation, but can fail to protect communities from malicious users. Systems like the Wiki Wiki Web "replace technical security with social and political limits" (Clifford Adams). The Web Of Trust concept attempts to create technical security that is based on the social strength of the community. An important part of the WebOfTrust (and what makes it different from a TrustMetric but the distinction is not always clear) is that it measures trust for each user based on his or her choices.

In cryptography, a web of trust is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to establish the authenticity of the binding between a public key and its owner. Its decentralized trust model is an alternative to the centralized trust model of a public key infrastructure (PKI), which relies exclusively on a certificate authority (or a hierarchy of such).[1] As with computer networks, there are many independent webs of trust, and any user (through their public key certificate) can be a part of, and a link between, multiple webs. The web of trust concept was first put forth by PGP creator Phil Zimmermann in 1992 in the manual for PGP version 2.0:... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

cf Reputation Management, Reputation Graph