On 5/24/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm their credentials. When you do this, a small icon appears by your name in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.
I think this is going to give the idea that the community is *less* credentialed that it actually is, since many people are not going to bother going through any complicated process of finding old certificates and proof of their qualifications and sending them to whoever is suppose to validate that these are real. Therefore, the credentials pages would show very few credentialed users, surely leading to more criticism of Wikipedia rather than less. I certainly don't intend to go looking through my parents' attic for old certificates (I assume that's where they probably ended up) just to make my edits on Wikipedia look more impressive. It's fairly easy for people to write on their user pages what they are qualified or experienced in, but it's a lot harder for them to actually prove that.
Angela.