Matthew Larsen wrote:
This might be discriminitive against people who do not have academic status though. Might have to be careful on that, not all academics are experts! (no degree in plumbing as far as I know)
There's also other credentials, like "long experience in the field". I imagine John Carmack has credentials when it comes to game AI, despite having no PhD in a related field (or even, gasp, a PhD at all!), for example.
But how to decide this seems a little bit of a case-by-case thing. Perhaps eventually we'll need a Wikipedia meta-editorial board of sorts? Some of these things are really pseudo-editorial decisions, and someone has to make at least some of them. Is someone with a PhD who takes outlandish opinions an expert (Linus Pauling on Vitamin C comes to mind)? We'd have to override their qualifications on a case-by-case basis, hopefully somewhat conservatively. And which non-credentialled people have enough experience to make them experts? Same decision. Of course we don't want a board deciding editorial issues directly ("this article shall say this"), but eventually making some sort of pseudo-editorial decisions ("this guy is not really an expert in the field") seems unavoidable. But how to do that without getting biased ("disqualify all people who disagree with global warming", or something of that sort) I don't have a good answer for.
-Mark