Hi Peter, This is all perfectly true. I didn't mean to say that an "everybody has a vote" certification proposal would be simply useless. But is there a *solid reason* for the "everybody has a vote" certification proposal? I'm still not sure I understand what it is. The above are advantages, but they don't clearly indicate what the reason, or purpose of the proposal is. Well, I'm not aware that *I* suggested any such thing... Maybe! It *might* also suggest to readers familiar with Everything2 and Kuro5hin and other projects that are self-evaluating, that the project is essentially a self-contained community, interested in impressing itself and not really interested in meeting independent standards. We all know that *accuracy* is only very poorly vouchsafed by a vote of the general public. That's as obvious a philosophical platitude as any. And while we rightly regard the typical Wikipedia participant as much more intelligent and well-informed than the average citizen of the Internet, the *reader*, who wants to rely on an encyclopedia for accurate information, has no particular reason to believe this. Much less does the reader have any reason to believe that our being "above average" indicates that articles we approve are necessarily reliable. That's quite a bold claim to make, if you think about it. Most librarians and experts, at any rate, are very careful about what resources they want to label as reliable. They are, you might say, hired to be information snobs. They will only recommend the best. And quite right, that's what they should do. So, no. A mere label will not suffice. The label has to be, in addition, *credible to the people who might recommend the resource to their students, colleagues, etc.*. ...and if the label is right alongside a label indicating the general publicly-voted status of the article, the "peer review" label will lose some credibility, it seems. Suppose Britannica were to put at the bottom of an article, "Reviewed by John Doe, Ph.D., famous Xologist. The general public has rated this article a 7.2 (out of 10)." But how on earth can we attract the "knowers" of the world to so much as think about Wikipedia for one hot second, without giving them some guarantee that they won't be wasting their time? And how *do* we give them that guarantee? Do you mean that we could create competing pages on the same topic? Well, notwithstanding the few pages where there are a few different competing articles on the page (this is viewed as a temporary expedient), this is one of the original ur-proposals for creating an encyclopedia, and on both Nupedia and Wikipedia we've always come out against it. Cf. [[neutral point of view]]. I disagree also that there's always room for one more page; there isn't always room for one more page. The fact is that Wikipedia has succeeded by being selective, in a certain sense. If we had not constantly insisted, "This is an encyclopedia, dammit!", and egged each other on to uphold certain standards, then we might have ended up like just another Everything2. You might be shocked (or not :-) ) to hear me say that Wikipedia is *selective*. It makes it sound like Wikipedia is an *elitist* project. But you know what--to a certain extent, it *is* an elitist project, and that is *partly* what's responsible for its success. The fact that it's elitist is what certain people, who are probably more jealous than anything, occasionally try to take us to task for, usually fallaciously appealing to our sense of democracy, freedom, and openness. How *dare* we think we can enforce a nonbias policy? How *dare* we draw a distinction between encyclopedia and dictionary? How *dare* we ban people who simply want to ruin the very thing we're working on? Who do we think we are, anyway? People who ask those sorts of questions just fundamentally disagree about Wikipedia is about--but that's putting it too nicely. In fact, they fundamentally lack the wisdom to understand what has really made it possible in the first place. Descending soapbox... --Larry