Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Basically, reviewers with academic credentials can add a mark (or "flag") to a specific version of an article, indicating that they approve of it.
Despite being in academia myself (or perhaps because of it), I must point out that having academic credentials is no guarantee of not being a nutcase, of not being egregiously biased, or of otherwise not being wholly unreliable.
I'm not sure what a good replacement is, but I don't think academic credentials are very good ones. Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime contributors are reasonably reliable.
-Mark