On 3/5/07, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
On Mar 5, 2007, at 12:58 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
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:
There are two issues that I believe are being mixed in this discussion, and that may require a different treatment.
Identity
Credentials
Identity -- The Amazon.com RealName (TM) is designed to guarantee
the *indentity* of the person, by the simple means of providing a credit card account that Amazon uses to verify the account holder name via CSV.
The main idea behind RealName is that if you are willing to put your real name up there with your comments, reviews, etc. you will be extra careful on what you write, and readers of your reviews will take that into account when reading them.
A "Confirmed Identity" system could be easily added to WP. If we had such a system in place, the Essjay scandal would have never happened ... TNY fact checking team would have only needed to run a check on Essjay "RealName"... rather that take his user page at face value.
This "Confirmed Identity" can be displayed alongside the username in edit histories, as well as an icon on the user's page. Implementation is quite simple.
This sounds much more like what we might want. Is Amazon's system open, or will we have to craft our own? It seems like the sort of thing that would be useful in more online settings than WMF projects, so we could likely get coding support from the wider FLOSS community, if we publicised the project.
If we really want to implement something like this, I can see a call for mandating Confirmed Identity for all positions of trust higher than Admin (adminship, whether or not it's still "not a big deal", is probably not a big enough deal to require Confirmed Identity from all 1000+ admins.) I think requiring Confirmed Identity from all future press contacts is a no-brainer, at this point.
- Credentials -- <snipped>
I think any direct confirmation of credentials would be problematic, and possibly erode community values that have served us well. Any effective confirmation of credentials will confirm identity as a side-effect; we shouldn't require superfluous effort from either editors or the office.