# Finding an appropiate manual weight

**URL:** <https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/finding-an-appropiate-manual-weight/180>\
**Category:** The CredSperiment\
**Created:** [August 27, 2019, 8:07pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/finding-an-appropiate-manual-weight/180 "2019-08-27T20:07:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Beanow](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/beanow/32/98_2.png) [@Beanow](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/Beanow)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2019, 8:07pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/finding-an-appropiate-manual-weight/180/1 "2019-08-27T20:07:30Z")

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From the issue [https://github.com/sfosc/sourcecred/issues/8](https://github.com/sfosc/sourcecred/issues/8)

We’re using Sourcecred at [SFOSC](https://sfosc.org/) for [attribution](https://github.com/sfosc/sfosc#contributors). One of the things I find isn’t accurately represented is the value of this commit

> <https://github.com/sfosc/sfosc/commit/553b1301ded6be9720cd3139aedc94ca4820397e>

It’s a complete book, already written before changes were tracked and no massive PR associated. A second issue is, there’s people credited for helping, which are also not given cred.

It seems to me, at least for Adams contribution here, this is a place where you’d use Sourcecreds feature to set a manual weight for this commit.

But my question is, how do you find an appropriate weight? Is there something better we can do than tweaking till it “looks right”?

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**Author:** ![Beanow](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/beanow/32/98_2.png) [@Beanow](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/Beanow)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2019, 11:56pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/finding-an-appropiate-manual-weight/180/2 "2019-08-28T23:56:24Z")

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One follow up thought I had on this came from today’s office hours where we were talking about using an additional parameter to boost early contributors, at least in terms CredSperiment dollar payout.

and later saw this

> [@\[DRAFT\] SourceCred and the Quest to Outcompete Capitalism](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/draft-sourcecred-and-the-quest-to-outcompete-capitalism/64/1):
>
> A concrete example
> 
> - I have a high school math teacher named Mrs. Leblanc who taught me calculus
> - She was a really good teacher, made the subject quite engaging, and helped solidify my love of math
> - In the current system, she gets paid based on the lowest price that some other qualified math teacher would be willing to receive (which is pretty low).
> - She’s paid based on her replacability, not on the value she creates
> 
> - In a cred-based system, she would now be earning some cred from all of the math-related work that I do
> - Which, since I’ve worked on TensorFlow, SourceCred, etc, should hopefully be some valuable cred 🙂
> 
> - the goal: a system that rewards people based on the value they create, rather than on what price they were able to negotiate, when framing their services as a transaction (employment)

In a sense, the way this is described is a retrospective evaluation. Partially thanks to the math teacher’s teaching, great math-related work was produced much later. Since that later work is valued, it reflects positively on the teacher.

That situation feels very similar to this commit and perhaps the value of early contributors in general eluded to in the office hours. Possibly I’m looking at this problem wrong and such a retrospective boosting trait is what I’m looking for.

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**Author:** ![decentralion](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/decentralion/32/7_2.png) [@decentralion](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/decentralion)\
**Post date:** [August 29, 2019, 9:31am UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/finding-an-appropiate-manual-weight/180/3 "2019-08-29T09:31:39Z")

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The best thing would be to get the actual data from the process of writing the book. E.g. if the book had been written using Git, we would have the commits.

I’m assuming it wasn’t written in Git, so we’ll need to create manual nodes to represent the creation process. With the manual plugin, we can still do a pretty good job with specific cred attribution.

If it were written in a text editor with distinct drafts, and the drafts went out to individuals for feedback, then we could make a node for each draft, and connect each draft to its reviewers. Each draft would also flow cred to the previous draft. Then we could also publish the drafts, and future cred-historians can tweak the weights on the individual drafts depending on how much new value each draft added.

However, the manual plugin doesn’t exist yet 😅. So for now you could consider having adamhjk make an issue in the repo which is like “placeholder for thanking the SFOSC book reviewers” and contains references to them. Then you could put a really big weight on that initial commit (to flow cred to adamhjk) and a big weight on the reviewers (to flow cred to the reviewers). Later we would remove those weights once we had the manual plugin up and running.

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**Author:** ![s\_ben](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/s_ben/32/816_2.png) [@s\_ben](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/s_ben)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2019, 2:11am UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/finding-an-appropiate-manual-weight/180/4 "2019-08-30T02:11:01Z")

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I imagine if the accomplishment is big enough, historians/the internet will do the work of piecing together who did what (e.g. the obsessive pouring over of everything satoshi wrote).

Speaking of books written in git, I did run SC (classic version) on Andreas Antonopolis’ book Mastering Ethereum.

![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/uploads/sourcecred1/original/1X/17a1f93b74ca95988f0ae6f6bf1a48e77bf6c89e.png)

He collaborated on it using GitHub (which he talked about at a talk at EthDenver (where I got the idea from)). Lots of authors too, so fairly rich graph: [https://s-ben.github.io/ethereumbook-sourcecred-demo/site/prototype/ethereumbook/ethereumbook/](https://s-ben.github.io/ethereumbook-sourcecred-demo/site/prototype/ethereumbook/ethereumbook/)

Was thinking of tweeting this at him, but he’s a pretty busy guy, not sure we’d get a response.

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**Author:** ![decentralion](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sourcecred.io/decentralion/32/7_2.png) [@decentralion](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/decentralion)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2019, 8:40am UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/finding-an-appropiate-manual-weight/180/5 "2019-08-30T08:40:31Z")

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> [@s\_ben](#):
>
> I imagine if the accomplishment is big enough, historians/the internet will do the work of piecing together who did what (e.g. the obsessive pouring over of everything satoshi wrote).

The goal of the mana / boost mechanisms in the CredSperiment is to incentivize “curators” to do this work of improving the graph and finding underappreciated contributions. I have more to write on this subject.