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

[Oldak Quill]

On 05/03/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> 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.


[For the sake of full disclosure, I'm doing my BSc at KCL.]

I have some concerns with the "impact on the social dynamics of
Wikimedia" (as Erik put it) that would result from Jimbo's idea. I
fear that users will unfairly be given more worth based upon their
credentials.

Academic credentials seem to me to have little to do with many of the
skills necessary to being a Wikipedian (even less so when it comes to
positions of trust). Sure, one would expect a user with a background
in academics to write readable, clear and well-researched articles
(such is their training), but beyond this the vast majority of work
done on Wikimedia (grunt work, minor edits, &c.) seem little helped.
What's more, I'm not sure how credentials would come into the article
creation/improvement process anyway: if an article is good and
well-referenced then it's quite irrelevent whether it's primary editor
has just secondary education or a PhD. [IMO, referencing should *in
theory* make the qualifications of our editors irrelevant]

Since academic credentials don't improve the intrinsic worth of an
article (at least, I don't believe so) and doesn't say anything about
a user's editing, community and administrator skills, I can't see a
reason to react to Essjay's controversy with such alarm.

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)