[WikiEN-l] Proposal for simplified credentials model

[stvrtg]

On 3/8/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> For the record, I am totally opposed to such a model.


Hm. I think you and I are in the minority.

But the Foundation should be entirely kept away from this. There is NO
> way our rare employees should have to deal with editors credentials.
> Doing so would on top further fuel the belief that we are in charge,
> putting us possibly at risk legally speaking.


The above reasoning aside, I think the real reason is that the Foundation
can't do this.
Keeping in mind that the Essjay situation was twofold: an internal issue
which deals with
community trust, which in turn became an avenue for outside criticism toward
Wikipedia
and [[open culture]] in general.

The Foundation being an institutional entity, it naturally will respond to
external and internal
pressures in institutional ways. Sadly, this is a case where I think you in
the Foundation must feel
entirely pinched - both by the mob outside and the mob inside. The benefits
of the many heads
paradigm is of course belied by the limits of the few headed Foundation.

This would entirely tip the very concept of our community. Trust built

not upon someone's credentials but upon what the person does.


The critics don't often understand this basic point. Or they don't care.
They are critics after all. They dislike
Wikipedia's success, its model, its community, its very existence. The would
love to see Wikipedia die by its own hand during some vain attempt to please
the critics or to live up to its own hype.

What counts is not the credential of the person, but giving a source for
> a controversial content. This is not because someone has a validated phd
> that he should be more reliable than another.


A reactionary response or not, some change in process is nevertheless
forthcoming. We can all sense that.
My sense though is that the right approach to dealing with this is to
develop some greater editorial oversight, rather than personnel oversight.
I'm mediating several cases this month, almost all of which involve some
misuse of the RS concept to exclude a POV, based of course on some
misunderstanding of or disregard for NPOV.

-Stevertigo