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--- title: Curation & Trust Networks visibility: public tags: [meta, curation, trust-network, governance] --- # Curation & Trust Networks — Meta Wiki A meta wiki of **use cases where curation matters AND a trust network is what makes the curation valuable**. The principle: information abundance is no longer the bottleneck — **trusted-source filtering** is. Curation is the act of filtering; the trust network is the substrate that makes the filter believable. This wiki indexes specific curation projects (mine and others'), and reasons about the structural pattern shared between them. > Companion catalogs: > - [[@jacobcole/trusted-claude-skills/index|Trusted Claude Skills]] > - [[@jacobcole/trusted-openclaw-skills/index|Trusted OpenClaw Skills]] > - [[use-cases|Use Cases (deep)]] — long-form list --- ## The structural pattern A **curation × trust-network use case** has all of: 1. **Abundance** — way more candidate items than any individual can vet. 2. **Risk asymmetry** — picking a bad item has real cost (security, time, money, health, reputation). 3. **Heterogeneous quality** — items range from excellent to actively malicious. 4. **No single arbiter** — no one authority can or should rate everything. 5. **Transitive trust works** — if I trust Alice, and Alice trusts Bob's review of X, I get a useful prior on X. 6. **Audit trails matter** — being able to point at _why_ an item is trusted (and revoke when wrong) is essential. If a domain has 3+ of these, **curation + a trust network is the right shape of solution**, not a single recommendation engine. --- ## Concrete cases (where this wiki applies) | Case | Abundance | Risk | Trust-net value | |---|---|---|---| | [[@jacobcole/trusted-claude-skills/index\|Claude Code skills]] | 7,000+ skills, growing | Code execution on dev machine; data exfil | High — 13% known malicious | | [[@jacobcole/trusted-openclaw-skills/index\|OpenClaw skills]] | 5,400+ skills | Same; agent often runs unsandboxed | Critical — 820+ confirmed malicious | | **MCP servers** (Model Context Protocol) | Growing rapidly | Code execution + data access | High; supply-chain auditing emergent | | **AI coding agents** (Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, Codex CLI, Antigravity) | Many overlapping ones | Repo / shell access | Medium — picking the wrong one wastes weeks | | **Open-source LLM model weights** | Hundreds of variants | Backdoor weights, license issues | Medium — emerging | | **Browser extensions** | Thousands | Same browser security context | High — OG of this pattern | | **VS Code / Cursor extensions** | Thousands | Code exec in IDE | High | | **Investors / VCs to talk to** | Many | Time, dilution, reputation, signal-to-noise | High — gossip-network is the existing trust net | | **Bodywork / chiro / PT practitioners** | Many | Health & money | High — friend-recs work, web-recs don't | | **Supplements & longevity protocols** | Vast | Health | High — most reviewers are conflicted | | **Spiritual / contemplative teachers** | Many | Years of life, sometimes cult dynamics | High | | **Academic papers & sources** | Endless | Wrong-belief downstream | Medium-high | | **Restaurants / venues / activities** | Many | Time, money | Low-medium (low risk) | | **Books to read** | Vast | Opportunity cost | Medium | | **News / commentary sources** | Vast | Belief-distortion | High — see [[lists\|the lists-to-curate triage]] (private) | --- ## My active curation projects The full list of curation projects pulled from Slack `#curate` lives in **[[@jacobcole/lists-to-curate/index]]** (private — some items are spicy). Public-shareable cross-references: - **Claude / OpenClaw skills** — this wiki - **[[@jacobcole/llm-wiki-ecosystem|LLM Wiki Ecosystem]]** — tools and implementations of the Karpathy LLM-wiki pattern - **[[@jacobcole/health-log|Health Log]]** (private) — bodywork practitioners, what worked - **[[@jacobcole/investors-wiki|Investors Wiki]]** (private) — investor profiles + interest space - **Climate Change Facts** — `climatechange.jacobcole.net` - **Media bias / source-ownership map** — pulled from `#curate` - **NVC / xyz-pilled directories** — `nvc.jacobcole.net` etc. --- ## Why a wiki + trust graph is the right substrate 1. **Pages are addressable** — every reviewer, every reviewed item, every endorsement gets a stable URL. 2. **Backlinks make trust transitive and visible** — clicking on a reviewer shows everything they've blessed. 3. **Revocation is a normal git operation** — when a reviewer is found compromised, their endorsements roll back as a diff. 4. **Forking lets dissent live alongside consensus** — you don't need a central judge. 5. **MCP / agent-readable** — the same curated network feeds the agents that consume the curated items. WikiHub is being built partly to be this substrate. See [[@jacobcole/wikihub|WikiHub]]. --- ## Open questions - What's the right "endorsement primitive" — a frontmatter signature? a separate signed-claims page? a per-page audit log? - How do you bootstrap a trust network without it becoming an in-group? (cf. early PGP web-of-trust failures) - Where does ML-based scoring (SkillHub-style) fit alongside human attestations? They aren't substitutes. - What's the right denylist/revocation model? Public denylists are themselves attack surface. - How to make _silence_ informative? "Reviewer X has not endorsed this in 6 months" should be readable signal. --- ## Inspirations / prior art - **Web of Trust** (PGP, GnuPG) — the originating pattern; mostly failed at scale, but the idea is right - **Wikipedia editor reputation** — implicit trust via edit-history - **GitHub starring + maintainer reputation** — the working trust net most devs already use - **Yelp/Reddit "trusted reviewers"** — emergent partial solutions - **Goodreads friends' shelves** — soft trust net, low-stakes - **Conservation / mycology field-guide tradition** — reviewers who literally signed each species ID --- ## Sources - See [[@jacobcole/trusted-claude-skills/index|Trusted Claude Skills]] sources - See [[@jacobcole/trusted-openclaw-skills/index|Trusted OpenClaw Skills]] sources - [[@jacobcole/lists-to-curate/index|Lists to Curate]] — the source backlog (private)