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.