On Mar 5, 2007, at 12:58 AM, 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:
There are two issues that I believe are being mixed in this discussion, and that may require a different treatment.
1. Identity 2. Credentials
1. Identity -- The Amazon.com RealName (TM) is designed to guarantee the *indentity* of the person, by the simple means of providing a credit card account that Amazon uses to verify the account holder name via CSV.
The main idea behind RealName is that if you are willing to put your real name up there with your comments, reviews, etc. you will be extra careful on what you write, and readers of your reviews will take that into account when reading them.
A "Confirmed Identity" system could be easily added to WP. If we had such a system in place, the Essjay scandal would have never happened ... TNY fact checking team would have only needed to run a check on Essjay "RealName"... rather that take his user page at face value.
This "Confirmed Identity" can be displayed alongside the username in edit histories, as well as an icon on the user's page. Implementation is quite simple.
2. Credentials -- This is a tougher one to implement and somewhat against the grain of the community culture; most of our content is not developed by experts with credentials, but by people that are passionate about the subjects they edit.
Going for an "identity" system, rather than a "credentials" system will also remove the possible negative consequences in edit disputes: "I have a PhD. in Greek literature, and I tell you that you are wrong about Parmednides". After all, if you are Joe Blow, tenured professor at the University of Guam, and you have a "Confirmed Identity" tag certifying that you are indeed Joe Blow, your credentials can be easily verified by whomever wants to make the effort to do so.
-- Jossi