Erik,
This is going to be nightmarish to police and run. Not to mention you
have to have a
signed release from the person in order to obtain access to this level
of personal information.
The whole controversy over Essjay will die down in time. Folks should
stop and think
things through rather than reacting to the bad publicity. One reasonable
step would be that any high ranking member
must submit accurate credentials before being appointed to an office of
trust.
Let's be honest, if it were a low level editor or admin on the english
wikipedia no one would have cared
or even noticed. It was because it was a high ranking member of the
community who had been used for
press interviews.
One other solution is that only PR or spokepersons talk to the press,
not just anyone.
Jeff
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 3/5/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
There are two parts to the suggestion: 1) marking
some statements with
a "verified credentials" tag, and 2) 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".
I'm cross-posting this to wikipedia-l and foundation-l, because it may
very well become a Foundation-level issue at some point.
I would support the following:
1) Any user can ask for his or her professional credentials to be verified.
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.
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.
We may extend this to regular users if it proves to scale well.
4) Users with verified credentials will get a little "Verified
credentials on <date>" marker on their user page, nothing more. This
marker would ideally be independent of the wikitext of the page, and
set in the user table instead.
I am opposed to any marker of edit contributions and such -- users who
care about credentials can look them up, those who do not care should
not be bothered by them in discussions or contributions.