Delirium wrote:
This sounds intriguing, but when you say "a process to confirm their credentials", do you mean we're actually going to verify them, e.g. by requesting official copies of diplomas from university registrars, copies of IDs so we know someone is who they claim they are, and so on? In the general case, confirming credentials is a *huge* hassle, even for organizations who exist largely to confirm credentials, like university admissions departments.
Yes, it would be a big job.
Now, our standards for confirmation would not need to be as rigorous as those for a university admissions department, since someone who somehow fools us with fake credentials isn't really doing a lot of damage. Obviously if we let anyone make up any credential at all, with no process of verification at all, then the whole thing would be a joke.
An even bigger problem is that it's unclear which credentials we should care about. Is a purported physics degree from a mail-order university a legitimate "degree in physics" credential? Etc.
I would imagine that community standards could be created to resolve this sort of trouble. It is a complicated matter but we are pretty good at detailed analysis of complicated matters.
Not to say it's necessarily a better approach, but it's interesting that we're not the first organization to sell ourselves mainly on the strength of our organization as a whole rather than advertising the credentials of our individual contributors. As [[en:The Economist]] points out, the well-respected _Economist_ newsmagazine goes one step further than us and doesn't credit authors at all---it almost never has bylines for its articles, and the name of its editor isn't mentioned anywhere in the magazine (not even on the copyright page). It seems to work well enough for them, although in many ways their situation is dissimilar...
I agree with you on every aspect of this.
--Jimbo