Careful what you read about ripple. A yearish ago some business people bought the ripple name from the academic who was working on it, and built something almost but not quite completely different under the same name. Anything written about the old system probably doesn't apply to the new one.
That description kind of fits both classic Ripple and the new Ripple, but it does fit classic Ripple better. The new Ripple does fully support social/community credit. But it's targeted more, at least for the near future, at acting as a payment system.
