erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:

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I understand your point, and I agree with it to some extent: People who

write articles aren't typically the best judges of their own work. But I think you're making a mistake by assuming that someone who would take part in a certification project that is a subset of Wikipedia would necessarily also be a) a contributor to the specific article/subject he certified, or even b) a contributor to Wikipedia at all. The experts you want could well use the system, see below.

I re-read my post and I do see how you might think that my main objection was that people who write articles aren't typically the best judges of their own work. That wasn't exactly my point, though (while I agree with that point, too). My point was that (to oversimplify) the results of certification-by-general-vote would not be trustworthy from the point of view of your school librarian. This is not because people would have judged their own work but because the certification process were not staffed and led by the sort of experts that your school librarian has been taught to trust.

(And perforce I wasn't assuming those other things you said I was assuming.)

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Elian suggested a scheme where we would simply get aggregated ratings

from everyone. I am familiar with such schemes (Kuro5hin uses it), and I have considered that option and decided to submit a different proposal, the team system. The idea here is that teams can make their own rules, and by selecting a team to trust, I select a whole ruleset according to which I want to view articles.

This, like my proposal and Elian's, is not new, and in the past I was lukewarmly in favor of it. I'm now lukewarmly against it. One thing would have to go: names like "Team Nupedia," as if we were engaged in sports. :-)

My fundamental objection to the team proposal is that it would make Wikipedia smack of the amateurism and, worse, the insularity and in-crowdishness that I detect on Kuro5hin, Slashdot, and other self-rated websites. There's already too much of that on Wikipedia. That's all right for K5 and /. but not for the world's largest *encyclopedia* project. We might let everyone *work* on articles, but I don't see how that entails that we should therefore set up a system whereby everyone *rates* the articles.

If the rating website were completely separate from Wikipedia, I think I'd have little to complain about. There are separate reasons, which someone rightly pointed out, not to do it on Wikipedia itself: it complicates things far more than they are already.

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I think the modus operandi here would not necessarily be different from

what you envision for a separate project, but have the advantage to be directly and visibly integrated into WP, thereby attracting more people (even if you want an expert-centric team, you will probably get more experts by addressing a larger sample of users).

Repeated experience with Nupedia confirmed what I knew already, that experts are very careful about who they associate with. I predict that most experts *wouldn't* be interested in participating in a certification project where they are on "just another team." I'd much prefer that the "expert-centric" team have its own website and own project.

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Other teams might adopt more liberal approaches, trying to separate

obvious low quality articles from possibly high quality articles (i.e. detecting egregious NPOV violations, spam, bad writing etc.). These teams might produce more output and be valuable to do basic filtering (which might go both ways -- I think it might be valuable to have negative certification, too, to detect bad articles; I believe it was Ed who suggested something similar). This is useful, but a separate goal from creating a truly trustworthy encyclopaedia -- in the team system, it can be accomplished within the same framework.

I see absolutely nothing to object to there!

Larry