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Given your needs, I would modify the design criteria: It's more important to have the system fail in understandable (to the players) ways than to try to make it foolproof. It should be a tool to help players simulate asking their friends for recommendations and references, not a black box that they expect to make decisions for them.
I think that the key to a trust system in this context is making being trusted a highly valuable commodity to other players. Maybe other players have to pay (in-game money ;) ) for personal references or submitted-content evaluations.
Suggestion: Anyone can rate anyone else in a predefined list of categories. This list would include meta-categories.
Example:
1a) How I rate X's Quality of RP
1b) How much I trust X's assessment of the quality of RP of others
2a) How much I trust X to fulfil a contract
2b) How much I trust X's assessment of other's contract trustworthyness
...
To simplify, all of the meta-categories could be represented as a single "Trust" of another player to make evaluations of others.
Newbies would default to not having ratings on the (#a) items for anyone, and having high trust in (#b) items for certain admin-selected characters (which may or may not actually be players, they could be just dummies that trust your principal "good people" on the mud)
When a player wants to know how much he should trust someone else, a weighted computation is done down his trust chain (highest ranking to his own evaluation of a person if it exists, lesser but still substantial weight to the ratings of people he trusts to make the evaluation, etc).
Failures would be of the following types:
1) A highly trusted character starts betreaying people. This is a problem with any system, but can be viewed as a valuable in-character event. It's not a bug, it's a feature! :)
2) You trusted the wrong peer group. Tough luck for you, isn't it?
3) Lack of "connectivity" between yourself and the person you want to know is "good" for whatever criterion you're looking for. I think that generally, a system like this reporting that there's insufficient information is better than giving a manipulatable or wrong answer "(I don't know him, and none of MY friends do either, but all of HIS friends say he's great")
Once the basic system is in place, you could consider expanding to inter-peergroup trust metrics if desirable.
The player can get more than just a flat number: a summary of key relations can be presented if desired.
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>evaluate Bob trustworthy
Most of your friends seem to find Bob trustworthy.
John strongly disagrees.
Bill's friend Greg also disagrees.
Your general social connections report that he's generally upstanding, but a few people have reported him to be dishonest.
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Now, implementing this in Rapture sounds like a challenge. I'd rather export data and do most of the processing off-line :)
Whether the user is capable of evaluating different qualities independently is a key early decision- would they simply give their friends the highest rating in all categories and someone who was rude to them a low rating in all categories?
And for your second need, approving content without admin approval:
A player who creates, say, an object, can submit it to other players for review. The trustworthiness of the collective evaluation can be computed using the trust viewpoint of admin chars. After a player has been creating for a while with admin approvals, he can start to get (admin-granted) trust from someone like Rurin.
If you make the normal admin approvals available (but inconvenient and/or costly- long waiting period, in-game currency cost) then having a heavily-trusted character would be very valuable and something unlikely to be squandered. Getting multiple such characters to sign off on inappropriate content would probably be very difficult if any player is free to submit a complaint about content.
Stilton
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