Copulist Society

A CopulistSociety is a StoneSociety in which each participant's Commission depends on the behavior of all the other participants. For example, each participant might join the society with 100 stones that can only be assigned to others. They assign and reassign their stones per Term based on their interaction with the other members of the Society.

In the simplest case this might be a matter for the conscious choice of each participant. A QuidProQuo buddy strategy would then permit each participant to obtain a Commission of 100 stones. But QuidProQuo is not stable; disagreements and the earning of respect would soon result in a more meritocratic, or at least populist assignment of Stones. If WardsWiki were to become a WikiStoneSociety, Ward himself would soon amass a very large Commission indeed.

Another kind of CopulistSociety would result if the assignment of stones was not a conscious choice, but depended instead on some automatic metric. For example, on the ratio of reads to edits that follow someone's edit. An edit that improves a page generally results in fewer followup edits to reads; readers who agree with the page don't generally edit it. An edit that harms a page generally results in an immediate correction, and few folk read such a page afterwards.

Of course in a WikiStoneSociety the problem is then the question of just what amassing a large StoneCommission? would be good for. It's generally thought that anything that detracts from the WikiNature is not good for wiki, so the notion of EditModeration based on Stones is not an attractive one ...