Jimmy Wales (jwales@wikia.com) [050524 22:58]:
I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview. Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real Professionals. As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.
"How do you respond to her argument?" "I find it hard to respond to because I can't make any sense of it."
Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews. In order to increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify themselves by their Real Names. We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of credentials. 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 dunno about icons in article history, but encouraging people more to list that sort of thing on user pages would be really good. There's a template for languages spoken and to what degree; that system could be extended. Put the templates in appropriate Wikipedia subcategories and you have instant handy directories of expertise in particular matters.
- d.