On 5/24/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
People could *optionally* go through a process to
confirm
their credentials. When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
I think this is going to give the idea that the community is *less*
credentialed that it actually is, since many people are not going to
bother going through any complicated process of finding old
certificates and proof of their qualifications and sending them to
whoever is suppose to validate that these are real. Therefore, the
credentials pages would show very few credentialed users, surely
leading to more criticism of Wikipedia rather than less. I certainly
don't intend to go looking through my parents' attic for old
certificates (I assume that's where they probably ended up) just to
make my edits on Wikipedia look more impressive. It's fairly easy for
people to write on their user pages what they are qualified or
experienced in, but it's a lot harder for them to actually prove that.
Angela.