[Wikipedia-l] An idea

[Ray Saintonge]

Angela wrote:

>On 5/24/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at 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.
>  
>
I think, like you, that there is widespread suspicion among Wikipedians 
toward credentialisation.  Credentialisation is a widespread problem in 
today's society where those credentials are more often evidence of an 
ability to comply than an ability to be creative.

Our community includes a wide variety of experts, many of whom have 
gained that expertise through avocation rather than vocation.  A 
contributor may be unfortunate enough to be a fully licensed and 
accredited lawyer, but always had a secret passion for Egyptology.  His 
father, an emminently practical man, may have threatened to cut off his 
inheritance if all he wanted to do was waste his life digging in the 
sand.  There's no money in that.  So while self-preservation made him 
into a lawyer, he still managed to become an Egyptology expert in his 
spare time ... all in his spare time, and all without any relevant 
paperwork. 

Our strong anti-credentialist trend brings out the knowledge that is 
locked up in people's passions, and not just what is neatly gift-wrapped 
in a diploma.  Autodidacts learn in their own idiosyncratic ways.  Their 
knowledge may often seem rough and prone to obvious errors, but the 
other side of that coin is that it is also not tainted by the received 
wisdom of disciplines where the professor's POV was beyond question.

We do have our share of "random morons".  That goes with the territory.  
It's obvious that Jimbo has thrown out this idea for discussion, and not 
as some kind of policy statemt.  Yet it would not surprise me if six 
months hence one of our random morons cited his comments as evidence 
that Jimbo was advocating rigid proof of credentials for any contributor.

What keeps me here is the underlying philosophy of the project, and I 
often wonder whether those who feel that the goals are best achieved 
through a lot of detailed rules have grasped that.  Then too I've always 
felt that, "Ignore all rules," is our most important rule. :-)   If our 
rule makers had been able to influence Stanley Kubrick his monolith 
would have been mounted horizontally.

Ec