At 08:26 AM 3/20/2007 +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
On 3/20/07, Bennett Haselton bennett@peacefire.org wrote:
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.
Isn't a credentialist approach much more vulnerable to Essjay style credential fraud? He may have faked his bio, but according to Wikipedia policy, it was not relevant.
Exactly; that's why Citizendium does plan to verify credentials. The easiest way to do this is that if someone claims to be a professor, you can verify their .edu e-mail address, and make sure that their e-mail address actually identifies them as faculty (either because their e-mail address is linked from a faculty Web page, or because it says faculty.schoolname.edu in the domain for example).
Remember, to give an article credibility, you only have to verify the credentials of the editors who signed off on the article and vouched for its accuracy, not the credentials of every person who contributed. (Well, at least, I think so. Some people might think that it matters *how* the article was written, whether by credentialed people or not. I think that only the finished result matters, and it's the finished result that is signed off on by the editors.)
-Bennett