Erik,

Thanks for bringing up the brilliance/excellence issue again. I note how you have related it to 'completion', 'trust' & 'certification' as well. It reminds me of Larry's idea of the Sifter project, and both your idea and his really go back to the original Nupedia project.

A WikiWiki is always going to have quality control problems. If any user can edit any page any time, then there's really no way to guarantee the conformance of ANY ONE PARTICULAR ARTICLE to our standards.

Of course, on the whole, we can still be confident of having 99.5% adhering to those standards (here I assume that only 1 in 200 are out of whack at any given moment). But many people find that statistic unsatisfactory.

As an American, I have a 99.98% chance of NOT dying in a car crash next year. 45,000 out of 250,000,000 people, however, WILL die that way, though. So a lot of people think cars should be made safer, and the auto industry, highway engineers and legislators have been making slow progress: the death toll has dropped 5,000 in recent decades, althought the total population has increased.

I think we ought to revive the concept of certification. I'm not saying I have a completely satisfactory proposal in mind, of course. But I think if we all put our heads together we can come up with something.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed