Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:07:11 -0500 In-Reply-To: 45EBDB9F.2070808@wikia.com (Jimmy Wales's message of "Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:58:07 +0900") Message-ID: 86r6s3wgao.fsf@elan.rh.rit.edu User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/22.0.95 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed --text follows this line-- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com writes:
In response to the EssJay scandal, I want to bring back an old
proposal
of mine from 2 years ago for greater accountability around
credentials:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/022085.html
At the time, this seemed like a plausibly decent idea to me, and
the
reaction at the time was mostly positive, with some reasonable
caveats
and improvements:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/thread.htmlto read the entire thread of "An idea".
Nowadays, I bring back the proposal for further consideration in
light
of the EssJay scandal. I think it imperative that we make some
positive
moves here... we have a real opportunity here to move the
quality of
Wikipedia forward by doing something that many have vaguely
thought to
be a reasonably good idea if worked out carefully.
For anyone who is reading but not online, I will sum it up. I
made a
proposal that we have a system whereby people who are willing to
verify
their real name and credentials are allowed a special
notification.
"Verified Credentials". This could be a rather open ended
system, and
optional.
The point is to make sure that people are being honest with us
and with
the general public. If you don't care to tell us that you are a
PhD (or
that you are not), then that's fine: your editing stands or
falls on its
own merit. But if you do care to represent yourself as
something, you
have to be able to prove it.
This policy will be coupled with a policy of gentle (or firm) discouragement for people to make claims like those that EssJay
made,
unless they are willing to back them up.
How to confirm? What counts as confirmation? What sorts of
things need
confirmation? These are very interesting questions, as there are
many
types of situations. But one thing that we have always been
very very
good at is taking the time to develop a nuanced policy.
Just to take a simple example: how to verify a professor? This
strikes
me as being quite simple in most cases. The professor gives a
link to
his or her faculty page at the college or university, including
the
email there, and someone emails that address to say "are you
really
EssJay?" If the answer is yes, then that's a reasonable
confirmation.
We can imagine some wild ways that someone might crack that
process
(stealing a professor's email account, etc.) but I think we need
not
design around the worst case scenario, but rather design around
the
reasonable case of a reasonable person who is happy to confirm credentials to us.
(This is a lower level of confirmation than we might expect an
employer
to take, of course.)
For someone like me, well, I have an M.A. in finance. I could
fax a
copy of the degree to the office. Again, someone could fake
their
credentials, but I don't think we need to design against some
mad worst
case scenario but just to have a basic level of confirmation.
--Jimbo
I like this proposal, as it is similar to one I've been bruiting about for the last few days.
The way I see it, there is no really golden mean between full pseudonymity (where you give few to no details about who you are; where "few to no" means that the obtainable information is limited to basically the sort of stuff userboxes cover - excluding stuff like your real name, address, phone number, employment or employment history and other things like credentials), and full transparency. When I saw full transparency, here I mean that enough information about one's life is given that, in principle, one can verify claims about expertise, official credentials, and so on.
Now, note that I emphasize verifiability. This differs from Jimbo's proposal. If I may use some out-moded descriptions, Jimbo's idea where one has another rank in the hierarchy where credentials are deemed verified (past tense) is more of an Immediatist/Deletionist sort of proposal. I am not surprised at it - it is a truth of Wikipedia history that every time a scandal of some sort scars the community, restrictive I/D proposals pop up and gain credence (example: disabling anonymous page creation after Seigenthaler), but that doesn't mean we should just do them. If we implement any such proposals, disarrayed and dismayed by a recent scandal, we will have to live with it a long time, particularly if orders for it come from the top and are enforced by changes in the MediaWiki software (remember, "code is law"). I understand many elder editors are not particularly convinced restricting page creation worked and that it should be turned on again, but because the order for that restriction came from the top and is implemented in code, it is literally impossible for anons to create pages except through meatpuppets of registered editors. And this has been the case for quite literally years (come this December, I think it will have been 2 full years). So if we are considering proposals which will give a subset of registered editors official imprimatur, possibly reflected in the software itself (not sure how else the "Verified Credentials" would be implemented), then we need to be rather careful.
That said, I also don't like the proposal because it adds yet another level to the hierarchy (how will it go? Anons, editors, Verified Credential editors, admins, bureaucrats, Checkuser, Oversight, stewards, board, Jimbo?), because it centralizes the activity of checking credentials, and just in general imposes overhead - the whole point of wikis is to reduce overhead and bet that it enables good users more than bad ones.
What we need to do is discourage the in between. There is no golden mean, but this does not mean we should set up yet another heavyweight process to verify people on the transparent end of the spectrum, but rather we culturally or perhaps by guideline or policy say that claims to expertise not backed up by verifiable information should be discounted and the claimer treated exactly as if they were pseudonymous. Let people claim to be professors, if they want, but let no one treat them as professors without sufficient reason to believe that. One cannot legislate common sense, as the saying goes.