By Robert Link, published at 7 August 2009 - 3:15pm, last updated 9 years 14 weeks ago.

From the text: "Reputation is a surrogate — a partial reflection representing our "best educated guess" of the underlying true state of affairs. Active evaluation by looking behind surface signals can corroborate or disprove reputations, while indiscriminate use degrades their reliability. The challenge is to encourage active evaluation, but also to use it efficiently since it will always be in limited supply...Being human, each of us has many limitations: time, access, ability, and experience. The main goal of developing enhanced reputation filters is to do as much as possible despite our individual limitations — to cooperatively pierce the veils of deception, mediocrity, and banality..."Who will guard the guardians?" — the age–old problem posed by the Romans remains just as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago. Accountability of leaders, of businesspeople, and of those entrusted with public duties must be a key goal of developing a society–wide reputation system ecology."

Manifesto for the Reputation Society by Hassan Masum and Yi–Cheng Zhang; First Monday, Volume 9, Number 7 - 5 July 2004

Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism: Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgments of quality.

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgment power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems — to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.