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

[Jimmy Wales]

In response to the EssJay scandal, I want to bring back an old proposal 
of mine from 2 years ago for greater accountability around credentials:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/022085.html

At the time, this seemed like a plausibly decent idea to me, and the 
reaction at the time was mostly positive, with some reasonable caveats 
and improvements:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/thread.html
to read the entire thread of "An idea".

Nowadays, I bring back the proposal for further consideration in light 
of the EssJay scandal.  I think it imperative that we make some positive 
moves here... we have a real opportunity here to move the quality of 
Wikipedia forward by doing something that many have vaguely thought to 
be a reasonably good idea if worked out carefully.

For anyone who is reading but not online, I will sum it up.  I made a 
proposal that we have a system whereby people who are willing to verify 
their real name and credentials are allowed a special notification. 
"Verified Credentials".  This could be a rather open ended system, and 
optional.

The point is to make sure that people are being honest with us and with 
the general public.  If you don't care to tell us that you are a PhD (or 
that you are not), then that's fine: your editing stands or falls on its 
own merit.  But if you do care to represent yourself as something, you 
have to be able to prove it.

This policy will be coupled with 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.

How to confirm? What counts as confirmation?  What sorts of things need 
confirmation? These are very interesting questions, as there are many 
types of situations.  But one thing that we have always been very very 
good at is taking the time to develop a nuanced policy.

Just to take a simple example: how to verify a professor?  This strikes 
me as being quite simple in most cases.  The professor gives a link to 
his or her faculty page at the college or university, including the 
email there, and someone emails that address to say "are you really 
EssJay?"  If the answer is yes, then that's a reasonable confirmation.

We can imagine some wild ways that someone might crack that process 
(stealing a professor's email account, etc.) but I think we need not 
design around the worst case scenario, but rather design around the 
reasonable case of a reasonable person who is happy to confirm 
credentials to us.

(This is a lower level of confirmation than we might expect an employer 
to take, of course.)

For someone like me, well, I have an M.A. in finance.  I could fax a 
copy of the degree to the office.  Again, someone could fake their 
credentials, but I don't think we need to design against some mad worst 
case scenario but just to have a basic level of confirmation.

--Jimbo