[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Accountability: bringing back a proposal I made nearly 2 years ago

[Erik Moeller]

On 3/5/07, Anthony <wikilegal at 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.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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