On 3/6/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
After some thought I'm fairly ambivalent about this. On the one hand I have some concern that this could lead to some people with "verified credentials" throwing their verified weight around inappropriately, on the other hand it may quiet some of our less dedicated critics.
I think the community has always been sceptical and disapproving of people who try to gain advantages in disputes or enforce their versions of articles simply because they have certain credentials. There are regular discussions in the mailing list archives about Wikipedia's "anti-expert bias", going way back to 2001.
I think this is so well ingrained in the Wikipedia culture that a verification system wouldn't be able to displace it, especially if it were implemented as nothing more complicated than a small note on a user's userpage saying, "yes, this person is not lying".
Either way I doubt much will come of it in terms of actual article quality and I probably won't bother to get verified myself. I'm satisfied that my edits stand on their own merits and they mostly aren't related to my degrees anyway.
The main goals of such a system, as I see them, would be to help editors trust each other with respect to the credentials that they claim, and to help those members of the reading public who are interested in the question "who writes Wikipedia?" to have greater trust in Wikipedia.