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

[Bryan Derksen]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 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:

After some thought I'm fairly ambivalent about this. On the one hand I
have some concern that this could lead to some people with "verified
credentials" throwing their verified weight around inappropriately, on
the other hand it may quiet some of our less dedicated critics. Either
way I doubt much will come of it in terms of actual article quality and
 I probably won't bother to get verified myself. I'm satisfied that my
edits stand on their own merits and they mostly aren't related to my
degrees anyway.

More generally, however, I am concerned about the idea of quickly
implementing new policies in direct response to breaking scandals. It's
been well over a year now since we lost anonymous article creation in
the aftermath of the Siegenthaler Kerfuffle and I still have no idea
whether it improved our quality, or even whether it had any effect on
how Wikipedia is perceived. Is this Essjay Affair even going to continue
to be a big thing outside the Wikipedia community? Something like the
webcomic notability issue seems more likely to remain a long-term PR
problem than this, IMO, unless we start seeing a flurry of additional
Essjays popping out of the woodwork.