Nope; as always it's "buyer beware."
Because of the way posts are mined for tags, it can be easy to see if someone is faking their expertise—the posts are likely to be incoherent keyword soups. However, it doesn't stop people copy-pasting wikipedia articles. That's also easy to detect, however. In the end, you're safest comparison shopping, accumulating advice from multiple sources and seeing what matches and what startlingly contrasts. I don't think any website can provide a foolproof system for establishing people's identities and credentials, and efforts to do so tend to go awry. However, all one's posts and conversations are linked back to their site identity, so people maintain a consistent identity, which one would think could help a little.
As to how it works, there are currently three ways to add content to the site, and more to add tags to your profile: You can write a post, more like a blog post than a message board post; you can have a chat with another user; you can allow the site to index your blog. To add tags to the profile you can do it directly, or you can paste in the URL of a page that has a lot of text about your topic on it. The tagging system also mines your posts and conversations. Altogether this process is supposed to create a tag cloud showing what topics you discuss most often. From that, users can make inferences about who is knowledgeable about certain subjects and how heavily involved they are in that topic.
Whether there is yet a safeguard to keep someone from just posting a text box full of the phrase "molecular gastronomy" over and over again and manipulating the tag cloud that way, I don't know. I suspect, though, that that wouldn't ultimately be very successful. |
