Kaj_Sotala comments on Med Patient Social Networks Are Better Scientific Institutions - Less Wrong

37 Post author: Liron 19 February 2010 08:11AM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 20 February 2010 01:44:17PM 2 points [-]

Strategies for gaming search engines are relatively easy to automatically detect and counteract, once you know what they are. On Wikipedia, a person who knows the subject in question will easily notice fradulent or incorrect information. But I'm not sure what criteria you could use to clearly detect cheaters on a site like this. You could ignore outliers, but that risks losing information from real people who actually have an unusual reaction to the medication. Even if you accepted that as necessary sacrifice, nothing's to prevent the cheaters from creating enough accounts to make them into non-outliers.