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Sharing your opinion is not obligatory. You can use WOT without ever testifying. So why should you? Because there are certain benefits to gain by testifying.

First of all, you can help other people by sharing your knowledge. The more testimonies we have for a website, the more accurate the reputation will be. Your testimonies can help other people trust the web more. But that's not all, you can also directly benefit from testifying yourself.

Personal reputations are available only after you have given a certain number of testimonies. Learning what you trust makes it possible for our system to fine-tune the reputations shown in your add-on to more closely match your trust model. At the same time, the more you testify, the more we can trust you. When we trust you more, your testimonies will weigh more and thus you have more influence to the reputations.

How should I testify?

As you remember, trust is subjective, and so are the testimonies. All opinions are equally good. There are no bad testimonies, only bad reputations. Therefore, if you have an opinion on a website, it is highly recommended to share it. If you later feel that your testimony was incorrect, then you can and should change it. This way, your previous testimony will be overwritten by the new one.

Testifying itself is very simple. In our help section, we have a Flash tutorial where a user testifies for the Wikipedia website. If you don't currently have Flash installed, we recommend you to download it from Adobe's website. (If you don't much care for Flash in general, we also recommend the Flashblock add-on). A simplified version of the tutorial is also available as an animation for those without Flash installed.

Basically, testifying is just about as easy as it gets. Click on one of the reputation bars and that's it. Your testimony is stored when you close the window. There's nothing more to it.

The linear scale of the bar without explanations might feel a little odd the first time. However, once you get used to it, it is very handy. You don't have to testify in all of the categories. However, if you accidentally testify in a category on which you absolutely have no opinion, we recommend you set the testimony to match the current reputation. If there is none, then somewhere in the middle of the reputation bar would be the best option.