"Steven Ericsson Zenith" wrote I'm surprised that you're surprised. I use my real name, but I respect the reasons others do not. I don't follow you at all. We should put certain things in the disclaimer, against giving WP undue authority. But if we had all real-name contributions, we should have to put almost exactly those things in, anyway. Concern to whom? What kind of support? They found a number of _mistakes_. The fact is that Britannica has similar mistakes, just no so numerous. Caveat emptor still applies. People shouldn't believe everything in the newspapers, nor on Wikipedia. That doesn't make newspapers or Wikipedia useless. Charles

On 12/27/05, Steven Ericsson Zenith <steven(a)semeiosis.com> wrote: If that were the case, I would not be an admin. I value my online privacy and as someone who is not yet secure in an academic career I would loathe if people could Google my real name and come up with results of me bickering with cranks online about any of the various subjects I end up bickering with cranks over. Adminship is supposed to be "no big deal" -- a broom and mop -- and there's no reason for good editors to give up their anonymous status, if they should desire to keep it, in order to take on a few more janitorial abilities. That isn't how Wikipedia has ever established its authority. That is in part why it is such a unique and wonderfully problematic entity. We don't rely on the reputations of our experts, we don't even require a full name. The authority stems from the belief that with enough eyes, any factual error is shallow. In practice it doesn't work out perfectly, as we all well know, but that's all part of the game. I don't think throwing around normalizing statements about how encyclopedias in general establish authority is going to be very applicable to a project whose entire modus operandi is subvert the traditional information model of an encyclopedia. Again, Wikipedia's authority has never and should never be laid in individuals. The entire point was to make it so that anyone, no matter how uncredentialed or autodidactic or even generally ignorant, can take a stab at increasing the world's knowledge. And be reverted by people of greater or even lesser knowledge. With the hope that it will all work out well in the end. Our authority, in an ideal system, comes from our ability to cite our sources, to fact check, and to trust one another on the basis of long and continued contributions. That's a problem? Perhaps it would be a more ideal world if people who formerly had trust and respect were occasionally audited. "Public confidence"? What public? What confidence? Joseph Goebbels happily gave his full name whenever he delivered nonsense. What you are talking about is identification, not transparency. Wikipedia is one of the most transparent enterprises on the entire internet -- it is easy to see in an instant everything a contributor has done, everything they have ever squabbled about, every time they change their mind and any place they might have been discussing a change before it was actually made. It is an easy task to show ever omission, every purposefully false addition, every bit of slander, as it went down, who did it, at what time, at what place. Encyclopedia Brittanica, by contrast, is a system with no transparency whatsoever. Oh, you can match names to articles. But that doesn't get you very much, in the end. And when EB's errors were pointed out by Nature, did they blame those individual authors? No. They blamed the encyclopedia as a whole. The same as they did with us. In the end, knowing the authors didn't change a thing. I don't think anybody made the mistake to think that Nature's review gave a completely clean bill of health to the entire encyclopedia, and the articles they covered were not strictly scientific, but included historical and biographical entries as well reviewed by academic historians, not scientists. (The difference between a historian's and a scientist's approach is quite apparent if you look at the error checklist for the Mendeleev article, done by a well-respected biographer of Mendeleev who currently teaches history at Princeton.) FF