[WikiEN-l] purpose served by anonymity / unmoderated edits

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Bennett Haselton wrote

> The disadvantage of making people register under a presumed real name, much 
> less following up and trying to verify their identity and credentials, are 
> of course that you will have fewer users that way.  On the other hand, the 
> advantage is that you can give articles the stamp of reliability if it's 
> been signed off on by, say, a professor whose .edu address has been 
> verified.
> 
> Could you get the best of both worlds by (a) allowing unverified users to 
> build up the meat of an article, but then (b) verifying the credentials of 
> certain users (Citizendium calls them "editors"), and having those users 
> sign off on the contents of a given article once it's reached a stable 
> state?  (And then future edits to that article have to go through them?)

One can. One could set up one's own wiki and import any WP articles that one wanted to 'bless' into it. 

The WP way has been to be free-wheeling and pick up the pieces afterwards. That's obvious. Something less obvious to most people, apparently, is that _discussing WP article by article_ misses the basic point that we write hypertext, not self-enclosed essays. You don't really 'improve' a knowledge network by stabilising it. I hear almost nothing from this angle.

Charles

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