On 3/5/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

There are two parts to the suggestion: 1) marking some statements with a "verified credentials" tag, and 2) a "policy of gentle (or firm) discouragement for people to make claims like those that EssJay made, unless they are willing to back them up".

I'm cross-posting this to wikipedia-l and foundation-l, because it may very well become a Foundation-level issue at some point.

I would support the following:

1) Any user can ask for his or her professional credentials to be verified.

2) Making up professional credentials is prohibited, and may result in a ban. (This may or may not be covered by existing policy, but judging from the Essjay case, it is probably not sufficiently clear.) This is independent of whether or not the user asks for credentials to be verified. We may investigate claims that are dubious when they are pointed out to us.

3) Any user trusted on admin level or higher who makes a statement of credentials on their user page must have them verified through a team of volunteers designated to this role by the Wikimedia Foundation (we may want to involve the chapters if this becomes international). The process of verification could be similar to what Citizendium uses, i.e.: a) have an existing, credentialed user vouch for the credentials to be correct based on personal knowledge, b) respond to an email associated with a reliable institution, and point us to a web page of that institution where their credentials are listed, c) point to someone associated with a reliable institution we can contact to verify the credentials.

We may extend this to regular users if it proves to scale well.

4) Users with verified credentials will get a little "Verified credentials on <date>" marker on their user page, nothing more. This marker would ideally be independent of the wikitext of the page, and set in the user table instead.

I am opposed to any marker of edit contributions and such -- users who care about credentials can look them up, those who do not care should not be bothered by them in discussions or contributions.