I am still confused. When you say that trust is authentication, what is it that you authenticate? Do you mean trust in the same sense as "web of trust" in PGP-type crypto systems?
For reputation as an assessment of user ratings, you can obviously build a bunch of various metrics, but the real question is which one is the best. And that question implies another one: Best for what?
Note that weeding out idiots, sockpuppets, and trolls is much easier than constructing a useful-for-everyone ranking of legitimate users. Different people will expect and want your rankings to do different things.
what is it that you authenticate? Do you mean trust in the same sense as "web of trust" in PGP-type crypto systems?
For starters, a system to be sure that a user or service is the same user or service it was previously. Web of trusts /or/ a central authority would work, but honestly we run into limits even before the gap between electronic worlds and meatspace. PGP would be nice, but PGP itself is closed-source, and neither PGP nor OpenPGP/GPG are user-accessible enough to even survive in the e-mail sphere they were originally intended to ope...
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.