[Wikipedia-l] An idea

[Stan Shebs]

Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

>
> A good point to which I'd like to add a few sentences.
> I think such a system, may it be based on verified credits or claimed 
> ones, benefits only two groups of people:
> * the reader who believes more in authority than his own 
> judgement/good arguments/etc

This is actually our primary audience though, because most people
are like that. For a certain class of not-so-bright readers, I
would actually claim we do just want them to accept WP as
authoritative, because their judgement is poor and their arguments
are bad - they will not make anything in WP better by touching it.

>
> On a side note a little story from german wikipedia. We recently had a 
> new user, claiming an academic degree in orientalism and islamic 
> science on his user page giving names of his teachers and everything. 
> While he was attacking all our old hand people in this area, 
> challenging them to put their credentials on their user page (nobody 
> had his degrees there), we tried to point him to a mistake he has made 
> in writing down the root of the word Islam. ehemmm. He didn't get it.

I was going to ask if anyone had ever seen that happen. On en,
I don't think I've ever seen any actual experts (that is, someone
with professional experience in addition to degrees) get caught
making serious mistakes in their specialties; conversely, the
experts find themselves spending much of their time fixing amateur
material that nobody else even realized was mistaken.

Stan