Chad Perrin wrote:
I see two ways in particular in which the idea can
backfire pretty
badly. One is, as Angela pointed out, we will likely have a lot of
"credentialed experts" unwilling to give up the goods on their offline
personae.
The other is simply that Wikipedia, among other things, is a fantastic
demonstration of a particular model of aggregate authorship (the wiki);
it is, in fact, sort of the perfect poster-boy for that model, and its
reputation depends to a large extent on the public perception of that
model's strengths and legitimacy. There's a very symbiotic relationship
between Wikipedia's reputation and the reputation of the wiki in
general. If one falters significantly, the other can as well.
To begin making concessions to standards unassociated with the wiki
model, as if only those carrying credentials are worth public notice, is
to undermine the credibility of the wiki model, or so it seems to me.
It seems likely that putting such a weight of import behind the
credentials of our experts would make Wikipedia more of a wanna-be for
"real" encyclopedias, and less of a revolutionary new type of
encyclopedia, in the eyes of many.
Of course, I could be wrong.
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
* the mediocre persons with credits. Someone really knowledgeable in a
field doesn't have to cite his credentials to gain respect in the
wikipedia community, his contributions speak for him. If you have to
refer to your credits in an argument instead of citing sources and use
arguments, there's something wrong.
I don't see it as absolutely necessary to accomodate these two group of
persons. It could even harm wikipedia if people suddenly started
valueing credentials more than previous contributions or well formed
arguments, based on good sources. We've achieved a lot with our current
system, no reason to change or endanger 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.
greetings,
elian