Reading the postings on setting up an article approval system for
Wikipedia, I had the following ideas (most elements of it have already
been mentioned by others).
Even though experts are no guarantee for quality, the credibility of
Wikipedia will grow as articles have been approved by field experts.
Therefore, there should be a mechanism to nominate an article for
approval by an expert (or more, if these are available); this should in
a way similar to the old voting system, and should IMO only be possible
by logged in users.
Experts are defined in two ways: field and nationality. This has the
benefit that an article on, say, a German mathematician is not only
verified by a mathematical expert, but also by somebody with knowledge
of Germany, being able to check the spelling of names, cities and check
local information (the mathematician's influence in Germany may be much
bigger than in the rest of the world). While experts will know a great
deal about their fields (mathematics, biology, philosophy), they
probably have some smaller areas in which they're particularly
knowledgable (logic, evolution theory, Nietzsche). When an article is
submitted for approval, the submitted should indicate which general
field the article is in, potentially specify the sub-field, and a
country (if applicable). For example, the article on the German
mathematician will be have : mathematics, sub-field trigonometry (f.e.),
country Germany. This will cause the page to show up on the approval
lists of the experts that have subscribed to one of these areas. An
expert can than indicate if he wishes to review the article or not. If
there are multiple experts willing to review, they can decide what
approach to take (the country expert may f.e. let the math-man do most
work and only check for names or so). After review, the experts may put
the document back without approving it. In that case, they should
indicate which elements are still missing in their opinion, and point
out other deficiencies (probably in the talk page). Alternatively, the
expert can decide to fix the current deficiencies and put the article
back as approved, or may simply give the article approval without change.
After approval, the article should NOT be locked for editing, but the
page should indicate that "this article is approved by an expert" or "a
previous version of this article was approved by an expert", in case the
article was edited since the last approval.
As for the admittance of experts, I think expert status should not just
be given to people with lot of titles or the like. Actually, I think
most of the current frequent editors, or at least the sysops, would
already qualify as an expert in my view. Having finished a higher-level
education on a specific subject, or even still studying is already some
qualification. A proven record of quality edits to Wikipedia articles on
the subject should be enough to get expert-status.
These are my ideas. They're still a bit of loose sand, and several
problems are still not addressed (such as the issue of how we actually
give people expert status), but I'd still like hear your reactions.
Jeroen Heijmans