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. However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort. And of course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia. Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start thinking about and discussing more generally. 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. What kinds of credentials would be acceptable? This could be totally open to a community process. Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds. Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or Redhat. Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by people who have advanced licenses. Published books might count as a credential. Magazine articles. Awards, recognitions of all kinds. Positions held in relevant organizations. Have you won a prize at a dog show? Then this is a credential which testifies to the public about your expertise in that area. Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture. First, anyone who ever suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk in the head with a WikiClueStick. Second, it should be made clear at every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and completely optional. The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are. Why should the world listen to us about anything? People think, and not unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that. As it turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that, hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons* after all. --Jimbo

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. However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort. And of course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia. Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start thinking about and discussing more generally. 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. What kinds of credentials would be acceptable? This could be totally open to a community process. Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds. Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or Redhat. Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by people who have advanced licenses. Published books might count as a credential. Magazine articles. Awards, recognitions of all kinds. Positions held in relevant organizations. Have you won a prize at a dog show? Then this is a credential which testifies to the public about your expertise in that area. Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture. First, anyone who ever suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk in the head with a WikiClueStick. Second, it should be made clear at every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and completely optional. The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are. Why should the world listen to us about anything? People think, and not unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that. As it turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that, hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons* after all. --Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

this causes problems for younger Wikipedians in that they could never have a degree at the age of 15, or whatever.

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.

Hi, Sometime ago, I created on French Wikipedia a "wikipedians per expertise domain" page (Wikipédiens par domaine de compétence [1]) that may fit your idea (actually 55 users listed). Personally I prefer this kind of community pages to list this information rather than icon stick near some user names. Aoineko [1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9diens_par_domaine_de… o

Jimmy Wales wrote: This sounds intriguing, but when you say "a process to confirm their credentials", do you mean we're actually going to verify them, e.g. by requesting official copies of diplomas from university registrars, copies of IDs so we know someone is who they claim they are, and so on?

On 5/24/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: I think this is going to give the idea that the community is *less* credentialed that it actually is, since many people are not going to bother going through any complicated process of finding old certificates and proof of their qualifications and sending them to whoever is suppose to validate that these are real. Therefore, the credentials pages would show very few credentialed users, surely leading to more criticism of Wikipedia rather than less. I certainly don't intend to go looking through my parents' attic for old certificates (I assume that's where they probably ended up) just to make my edits on Wikipedia look more impressive. It's fairly easy for people to write on their user pages what they are qualified or experienced in, but it's a lot harder for them to actually prove that.

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. However, I travel all over the world meeting Wikipedians, and surprise surprise, most of them are Real Professionals of some sort. And of course, Wikipedia *is* an encyclopedia. Now, here's the idea that I had, and there are perhaps some reasons it is a bad idea, but I think it has more merit than not, so I wanted to bring it up for feedback and see if it is something we want to start thinking about and discussing more generally. 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. What kinds of credentials would be acceptable? This could be totally open to a community process. Clearly, all sorts of college degrees make sense, but the wide kinds of expertise that are involved in writing Wikipedia might call for useful credentials of many kinds. Examples would include computer certifications such as MSCE or LPI or Redhat. Our article on [[Amateur Radio]] has surely been edited by people who have advanced licenses. Published books might count as a credential. Magazine articles. Awards, recognitions of all kinds. Positions held in relevant organizations. Have you won a prize at a dog show? Then this is a credential which testifies to the public about your expertise in that area. Such an initiative would have to be done carefully in order to respect our (fairly anti-credentialist) culture. First, anyone who ever suggests that a credential gives one precedence in editing gets a bonk in the head with a WikiClueStick. Second, it should be made clear at every point of contact with a credential system that it is fully and completely optional. The idea is this: people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are. Why should the world listen to us about anything? People think, and not unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that. As it turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential fetishists, there's nothing particularly wrong with advertising that, hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons* after all. --Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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

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.

* 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 think, like you, that there is widespread suspicion among Wikipedians toward credentialisation. Credentialisation is a widespread problem in today's society where those credentials are more often evidence of an ability to comply than an ability to be creative. Our community includes a wide variety of experts, many of whom have gained that expertise through avocation rather than vocation. A contributor may be unfortunate enough to be a fully licensed and accredited lawyer, but always had a secret passion for Egyptology.

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.

On 5/25/05, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> > I was happy I am in Thailand in this respect, as in the Netherlands I > > still have over a hundred books (mostly 2nd ww) so I only had to list > > about 20. We already had the first usefull exchanges in people asking > > eachother to look things up. Basically most of us wrote down everything, > > from specific dictionaries and encyclopedias through travelguides to > > very specific books. We could even have something on Meta ..... the > > wikilibrary? the wikisearch?

> To scale well, this would be have to searchable by book, wouldn't it? > (Very tedious to look through, say, 50 Wikipedians' user pages just to > see if they have this particular book.) This would be very useful if > it could work..

Yes but then we could also have a book-club-type VP, where I' could go and say..."I am stuck on this article, does anyone have a book that says anything about notafishes and their natural habitat?". It could even be cross projects and cross languages. I really like this idea. After a while, I am sure we'd know who has what and if not, who can tell us who has what.

We all here are an expert in at least one area. And I guess most of us could show diplomas. The other ones could show their expertise in fields which are not sanctified by diplomas. It make little sense to me to highlight some of us and not the others.

David Gerard wrote:

>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.

Right, so I'll put a template on my user page saying that I have studied computer science. Then someone comes along and changes something in an article about a politician. Am I then disallowed from fixing their mistake because I am not an "expert" in the relevant field?

This sounds intriguing, but when you say "a process to confirm their credentials", do you mean we're actually going to verify them, e.g. by requesting official copies of diplomas from university registrars, copies of IDs so we know someone is who they claim they are, and so on? In the general case, confirming credentials is a *huge* hassle, even for organizations who exist largely to confirm credentials, like university admissions departments.

An even bigger problem is that it's unclear which credentials we should care about. Is a purported physics degree from a mail-order university a legitimate "degree in physics" credential? Etc.

Not to say it's necessarily a better approach, but it's interesting that we're not the first organization to sell ourselves mainly on the strength of our organization as a whole rather than advertising the credentials of our individual contributors. As [[en:The Economist]] points out, the well-respected _Economist_ newsmagazine goes one step further than us and doesn't credit authors at all---it almost never has bylines for its articles, and the name of its editor isn't mentioned anywhere in the magazine (not even on the copyright page). It seems to work well enough for them, although in many ways their situation is dissimilar...

To me it appears to be quite a display of cognitive dissonance. "We (wikipedia in the aggregate) don't think that credentials carry any weight. At least, not enough to influence our content or policies in any meaningful way. However, because other people value credentials, we have trouble building credibility without them, so we would like to advertise them in order to enhance our reputation. We're happy to trumpet our contributor's qualifications, as long as it's clear that they mean nothing to us and in no way affect our process."

Andrew Venier wrote: I think that's a fairly accurate summary, but I don't know why you call it cognitive dissonance. --Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Knowledge and the ability to communicate it are what matter. Credentials are evidence of the possibility that the person is familiar with knowledge regarding a topic and can communicate that knowledge, but not proof in the absence of performance.

If we wish to be anti-intellectual-elite we should not avoid this process,

I'm not familiar with COPPA. What does it stand for? I also have no memory of evr visiting Live Journal. Still, whether children connect to the site is a family matter. When someone says that he is not a child, who can tell the difference?

Timwi stated for the record: It does not apply at all. COPPA specifies what information a site is allowed to collect about children under 13. We don't collect any applicable information about our users.

How does the law define "collect"? We do store all information that these children put on their user pages themselves, in the same way LiveJournal stores only information that was entered by the user...

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 08:04:02PM +0200, Angela wrote: 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.

> focusing on credentials might well reduce contribution; even in its > absence, the most common reason my brilliant iconoclastic US friends > give me for not writing about <whatever they're reading / studying> in > Wikipedia is that they are "no expert" on the subject. > > --SJ

In a world that is moving to greater transparency, wikipedia is, in fact, a model. Consider being able to earn one's degree by writing on wikipedia. Edit articles, have a thesis advisor review contributions, and score credit appropriately. Adding bibliography, annotation and other activities which "polish" wikipedia would be part of assignments.

Stirling Newberry wrote: Once all articles relating to a particular topic are featured articles, there isn't much left to do for other prospective graduates of the same subject. Timwi

Sorry, but your last sentence is a bit confusing to me. Are you trying to say "the Polish Wikipedia would be part of assignments to add bibliographies, annotation, and various other activities"? Mark

In a world that is moving to greater transparency, wikipedia is, in fact, a model. Consider being able to earn one's degree by writing on wikipedia. Edit articles, have a thesis advisor review contributions, and score credit appropriately. Adding bibliography, annotation and other activities which "polish" wikipedia would be part of assignments.

In a world that is moving to greater transparency, wikipedia is, in fact, a model. Consider being able to earn one's degree by writing on wikipedia.

Not only that. The work has meaning because it is available to everybody. Once finished, and the degree granted, it is no longer relegated to gathering dust in inaccesible library stacks where nobody ever visits.

Why would you have to move it somwhere else?

But if you accidentally find out something that wasn't known before you'd have to erase it from Wikipedia and move it somewhere else... :/ Which also implies you could never earn a PhD by writing on Wikipedia. I hope Wikiresearch and/or Wikiversity will become a bit bigger to tackle this inconvenience. :)

How does one, in the course of documenting what is known on a topic, "accidentally find out something that wasn't known before"?

On 6/8/05, Gregory Maxwell &lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > Eh, it's quite possible, .. for example in making a example for a math > article you might stumble on something somewhat novel, but often in > mathematics we can empirically confirm the truth of something in a way > which doesn't assert POV. So you might say that NOR is less important > in articles about math. ... but at the same time, it's not like > placing something in an article gets people to test the proof, so NOR > is still potentially valuable there because the majority of 'great new > mathematical ideas' are actually wrong. :