On 3/10/07, Kat Walsh kat@wikimedia.org wrote:
As many others do I believe this is too bureaucratic, and I don't think it will ever be followed on a wide enough scale to be useful.
Yes, I would like to add my real life experience. Some years ago, I enrolled myself to an academic online database for matching jobs. They are an institute run by government, required my snail mail address to send a new password (and perhaps verify my address) but require no credentials at all. While this kind of information is someday need first when you apply for the opening job, but that is what we want? A commitment as serious as the case you are applying for the job irl? To introduce ourselves online, we need the level of verification even governmental organizations wouldn't require? Personally I suspect how many people would like to commit to the project in such a depth ...
Positions of personal-level trust are different -- checkusers, press contacts, and similar. And for those, I don't care about credentials, unless the credentials are in some way related to what they are doing -- just identity, that they are who they say they are. Already we ask that stewards prove they are over age 18; checkusers *should* be the same. I'm sure we will be more stringent about checking on the identities of press contacts in the future.
Agreed strongly. As for checkuser, I made a similar question/proposal on meta [[m:Talk:Check user policy]]. If you are interested, please give a look to talk and input your idea. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:CheckUser_policy
Personally I think we are better to require the same qualification for oversight, but it would be another issue ...
Cheers,