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