I'm writing an article (possibly for Slashdot) about the alternative models
for Citizendium vs. Wikipedia and how they pertain to the Essjay controversy. It's not so much about Essjay as about the more general merits of anonymous / unmoderated edits, versus identity verification and change moderation, and how Essjay illustrated a flaw in one approach.
The disadvantage of making people register under a presumed real name, much less following up and trying to verify their identity and credentials, are of course that you will have fewer users that way. On the other hand, the advantage is that you can give articles the stamp of reliability if it's been signed off on by, say, a professor whose .edu address has been verified.
Could you get the best of both worlds by (a) allowing unverified users to build up the meat of an article, but then (b) verifying the credentials of certain users (Citizendium calls them "editors"), and having those users sign off on the contents of a given article once it's reached a stable state? (And then future edits to that article have to go through them?)
This simple act of an expert "blessing" an article greatly increases its value to many people, who would then be able to (a) have more confidence in the article's accuracy, and (b) cite it as a source. When I mentioned this on Wikia-L, Laurence Parry pointed out that that's not really what Wikipedia is for -- OK, but couldn't it be? If you can greatly increase an article's usefulness with only a small additional amount of effort (the time it takes a verified expert to read it and sign off on it), why not? Especially since many people, rightly or wrongly, use Wikipedia for that purpose anyway.
Thus I'm arguing for more verification than Wikipedia does, but at the same time, less verification than Citizendium is doing. Citizendium is planning on using some combination verification/referral system for new users, but I think that's overkill. You don't necessarily need to know the credentials of everyone who contributed to an article, just the people who reviewed it at the end and said, "Yes, this is accurate, I'll stake my reputation on it."
My question is: If you consider the goals of an online encyclopedia or pseudo-encyclopedia (entertainment, accuracy, being used as a citable source, etc.), are any of these goals better served by the unmoderated / unverified edit model, compared to the model of editor-verification-and-locking?
(I know it's tempting to say, "Let's just wait and see which one more users prefer", but I don't think that would be a fair way to compare the two systems, because there are too many other factors that could tilt the balance, independently of which system is actually better -- such as, Wikipedia having gotten there first, or having more users.)
-Bennett
bennett@peacefire.org http://www.peacefire.org (425) 497 9002