[Wikitech-l] Feature Proposal: Certification

One key problem with a wiki encyclopaedia is that there's no quality control whatsoever. An article may have been vandalized 5 seconds ago, or be grossly non-NPOV etc. As we get more and more articles, this problem becomes more urgent. Fortunately, the solution is rather simple. Articles can be certified by contributors to be high quality. But who is allowed to certify articles? The system works by allowing groups of people to form certification teams. Anyone can submit a new team to be created, and anyone can apply to join an existing team and certify articles in its name. Users can then decide to view only article revisions certified by members of selected teams. So I could decide in my user preferences: Certification: Approved Teams Team Nupedia Team Wiki-Fiction Team Wiki-Maths Then there would have to be a way to display certified article revisions. This could be accomplished by having a "Certified Mode", showing *only* articles that have received certs, with the most recently certified revision shown. Somewhat weaker, where an article has been certified, a link "There is a version of this article certified by Team X" could be placed above the article, showing the certified revision when clicked (or a text "This article has been certified by .." if the current revision is the certified one). This could be the default view, making users aware of the cert system. Each team could have its own quality standards, policies, and subject preferences. I suggest that the creation of new teams would have to be approved by the Wikipedia cabal to avoid "Team Trolls". New team members would either be voted on or approved by team members that have a certain status flag ("can_approve_newcomers"). Teams could get their own namespace as well. A decision would have to be made as to which teams to include in the default view, i.e. the one that anonymous and newly registered users get. In the short term such decisions may be made by the cabal, in the long term I would prefer voting. Implementation: There needs to be a teams table that at least has a TID and a TDesc, and a team-member table that links TIDs and UIDs and grants individual users certain permissions within the team, as well as a "pending" status flag for newly applied members. A TCert table would link UIDs, TIDs certs and article IDs (must include timestamp). I am currently assuming that certifications would be simple "Good article" binary flags. My reasoning is that a rating of "good, but not good enough" may not be very helpful. Still, practice may prove that wrong, and the table should therefore be designed to accomodate possibly more flexible ratings. Giving each individual member the power to rule an article certified in the name of the whole team may be undesirable. Thus, teams should be configurable to set their own min_number_of_certs, where certifications would only be valid if so many team numbers agree that the article is complete and high quality. Finally, the PHP scripts of course have to be updated to reflect this functionality. There needs to be some way to apply for team membership, to approve team membership, and to submit a new team for cabal approval. A module listing all articles approved by a certain team would be nice and could substitute the "Brilliant Prose" page. Results: -------- If this works as intended, it should solve the quality problem and allow users to browse Wikipedia as a high quality content only encyclopaedia. The more teams you would admit to your personal filter, the more content you would see, but quality standards of individual teams might not be up to par. By distributing the job of quality approval on several team leaders, we can get competition of quality standards and social methods, which is probably a good thing and reduces social problems. Potential problems: ------------------- If too many people use highly customized views, caching will get harder. I don't see this as too big a problem as a) most people typically don't customize views, b) article retrieval is already very fast with or without caching. Too many teams may have undesired effects, such as teams deliberately inserting POV articles to certify them. This is not a problem with the team principle per se but with the way teams are approved and moderated. Generally, teams should have a clear NPOV commitment and respect Wikipedia policy, otherwise they should be deleted. Comments on this would be appreciated. This is something I probably won't have time to implement fully, but I will gladly help with any/all efforts. I consider it very necessary for Wikipedia in the long term. Regards, Erik Moeller -- FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de