On 05/03/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
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.
[For the sake of full disclosure, I'm doing my BSc at KCL.]
I have some concerns with the "impact on the social dynamics of Wikimedia" (as Erik put it) that would result from Jimbo's idea. I fear that users will unfairly be given more worth based upon their credentials.
Academic credentials seem to me to have little to do with many of the skills necessary to being a Wikipedian (even less so when it comes to positions of trust). Sure, one would expect a user with a background in academics to write readable, clear and well-researched articles (such is their training), but beyond this the vast majority of work done on Wikimedia (grunt work, minor edits, &c.) seem little helped. What's more, I'm not sure how credentials would come into the article creation/improvement process anyway: if an article is good and well-referenced then it's quite irrelevent whether it's primary editor has just secondary education or a PhD. [IMO, referencing should *in theory* make the qualifications of our editors irrelevant]
Since academic credentials don't improve the intrinsic worth of an article (at least, I don't believe so) and doesn't say anything about a user's editing, community and administrator skills, I can't see a reason to react to Essjay's controversy with such alarm.