John C. Penta wrote:
The idea that articles can have different degrees (or different categories) of certification also has a certain appeal. But I prefer to make small steps to a full-fledged certification system, so that we can always turn around if something goes wrong.
Much agreement. IMHO, a cert system would be a good idea for one very simple reason: As it stands, NONE of my profs will trust ANYTHING from Wiki. I imagine many professors and teachers are like that; It would help immensely if there was some credibility built up.
Really, really annoying when Wiki has a fact I can't easily find anywhere else.
This is going to need more verification than just saying "yeah, this is a good article" though. To be able to trust the content of any Wikipedia article, someone with knowledge of the field has to check up on the facts in reliable primary or secondary sources. The vast majority of Wikipedia articles, as far as I can tell, currently draw their facts from the internet, which is filled with incorrect facts propagated from website to website. Even things like birth dates are suspect, with it not being uncommon for a typo on a single website to propagate to others and eventually into Wikipedia. So, to get something reliable, we need to find people who are willing to verify facts in libraries, not just in google. The only major exception I see to this are facts taken from US government websites (census bureau, NASA, etc.), which I'd be more likely to trust than facts taken from some random biography on geocities (at least when we're dealing with strictly facts, not subjective analysis).
-Mark