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

[Delirium]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 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.
>   

I don't particularly like it.  I have some credentials, and in a few 
years when I complete my PhD I'll have some more, but on principle I 
would not verify them, yet I would continue to state them offhand on my 
userpage (they're true, after all), although I would not really state 
anything more strongly than "I research in this area" (a vague 
non-credential) in an actual content discussion.  Verifying credentials 
opens up a huge minefield of what sorts of credentials count (we now 
have to come up with an official list of diploma mills, etc.), and 
promotes a sort of credentialism whose absence is largely responsible 
for Wikipedia's success.  Basically the only way I could see it being 
beneficial for Wikipedia is in the very narrow sense of avoiding 
negative press coverage for Essjay-like cases, but that's a small PR 
benefit for the much larger amount of real damage it could cause to the 
encyclopedia's quality and community.

-Mark