On 9 August 2010 20:45, James Heilman <jmh649(a)gmail.com> wrote: This has been rejected on Wikipedia repeatedly. Not for ideological reasons, but practical ones. * articles are in a continous state of having to prove themselves; * the en:wp arbitration committee expressly avoids content issues, and their forays into them have always ended up ludicrous failures; * experts are generally respected, but still have to show their working, and there is no mechanism to get idiots out of their faces. The last of these is the real sticking point for a lot of people: you can hardly move on Wikipedia without bumping into someone with a string of qualifications who knows much more about the topic at hand than you ever will. But we have no way to keep idiots out of their faces. The trouble is that attempts to make something that lures experts but keeps idiots out of their faces have so far failed and/or attracted no attention, even from the experts (Citizendium, Scholarpedia). That is, they sound like a good idea; but in practice, Wikipedia has so far been the least worst system. This is less than ideal in all sorts of ways. But a system of content arbitration requires that the arbitrators be smarter on *all topics* than *everyone else in the world put together*. This may not be feasible in practice. You could fudge it with a system of committees. But a credentialist system of expert committees is one of the things that killed CItizendium: pseudoscientists, who have no actual expertise but understand the social importance of sheepskins, moved in and took over. [1] - d. [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium#Crank_magnetism