draft author:wds4
The term confidence in DCoSL refers to how much confidence a user should have in some determination made by one's web of trust, and is typically based on how much trust the user has in the data sources.
When average scores are calculated by legacy social media such as Yelp or Amazon, typically two numbers are presented to the user: the average score itself and the number of ratings that were used to calculate the average score. The idea is that higher number of ratings means more trust in the result. The problem, of course, is that the user frequently has little or no idea whether the authors can be trusted. Amazon, for example, is plagued by ratings farms hired by vendors to inflate ratings (place citation).
In DCoSL, the second number is replaced by a number called input, which is a sum of the influence scores of the author of each rating. Input is a nonnegative scalar. This value is mapped onto a variable called confidence which is a number between 0 and 1 (or 0 to 100%).