Matthew Larsen wrote:
This might be discriminitive against people who do not
have academic
status though. Might have to be careful on that, not all academics are
experts! (no degree in plumbing as far as I know)
There's also other credentials, like "long experience in the field".
I
imagine John Carmack has credentials when it comes to game AI, despite
having no PhD in a related field (or even, gasp, a PhD at all!), for
example.
But how to decide this seems a little bit of a case-by-case thing.
Perhaps eventually we'll need a Wikipedia meta-editorial board of
sorts? Some of these things are really pseudo-editorial decisions, and
someone has to make at least some of them. Is someone with a PhD who
takes outlandish opinions an expert (Linus Pauling on Vitamin C comes to
mind)? We'd have to override their qualifications on a case-by-case
basis, hopefully somewhat conservatively. And which non-credentialled
people have enough experience to make them experts? Same decision. Of
course we don't want a board deciding editorial issues directly ("this
article shall say this"), but eventually making some sort of
pseudo-editorial decisions ("this guy is not really an expert in the
field") seems unavoidable. But how to do that without getting biased
("disqualify all people who disagree with global warming", or something
of that sort) I don't have a good answer for.
-Mark