Web of trust
A web of trust is a public key infrastructure component that mirrors a social network: listing who trusts who to identify themselves and to verify when digital signature and/or email address has changed, or if a person is dead, disabled or removed from their position w.r.t. some role account.
There are various ways to think about using such a structure - one of the common but poorly advised ways to use it is to represent positive repute - an error made at advogato.org and perhaps also at Wikipedia quite soon:
This very bad idea is advocated by Daniel Mayer, which is enough reason to reject it outright. Mayer believes in a strict hierarchical civilization based only on technology, where technological escalation is the source of trust and power, and so-called "trolls" may be hunted down. Evidence for this is not hard to find - Mayer files false police reports against those whom he believes have offended him. Why anyone would want to reveal personal trust data to such person is beyond us.