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

[geni]

On 3/5/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 1) Any user can ask for his or her professional credentials to be verified.
>


Creates work for office or simular that doesn't result in much benefit.

> 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.

No. No community support for this and appears to be policy cruft.
Better to go with. "makeing up credentials mad result in bad things
happening please don't".

>
> 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.
>

Oh man please no. Way too buracratic. People wanting to avoid it will
would have to remove such claims even when true before running for
adminship which wont look good. OR could run into the rather odd case
of people mentioning credentials on some projects but not on others.


There was majority support for essjay staying an admin. There were
problems above that level but I feel the requirements for running for
arbcom are at present about right (in terms of getting a decent mix
and number of candidates but not too many) and the community keeps a
pretty tight watch on buracrats. Oversight and checkuser are de-facto
at least arbcom and or the foundation's responcibilty and thus may be
subject to different standards.



-- 
geni