Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
A good point to which I'd like to add a few sentences. I think such a system, may it be based on verified credits or claimed ones, benefits only two groups of people:
- the reader who believes more in authority than his own
judgement/good arguments/etc
This is actually our primary audience though, because most people are like that. For a certain class of not-so-bright readers, I would actually claim we do just want them to accept WP as authoritative, because their judgement is poor and their arguments are bad - they will not make anything in WP better by touching it.
On a side note a little story from german wikipedia. We recently had a new user, claiming an academic degree in orientalism and islamic science on his user page giving names of his teachers and everything. While he was attacking all our old hand people in this area, challenging them to put their credentials on their user page (nobody had his degrees there), we tried to point him to a mistake he has made in writing down the root of the word Islam. ehemmm. He didn't get it.
I was going to ask if anyone had ever seen that happen. On en, I don't think I've ever seen any actual experts (that is, someone with professional experience in addition to degrees) get caught making serious mistakes in their specialties; conversely, the experts find themselves spending much of their time fixing amateur material that nobody else even realized was mistaken.
Stan