[Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Feature Proposal: Certification

[Larry Sanger]

> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
> >...
> >Whatever becomes a professional review mechanism
> >for Wikipedia, let me tell ya how I think it should
> >work: the reviewer should look at a candidate
> article,
> >perhaps make a few last minute changes on Wikipedia,
> >and then press a button, and it's posted as
> certified.
> >End of story.
> >After our experience with Nupedia, I think it should
> >be *that* simple. On this conception, *Wikipedia* is
> >the editing mechanism; the review mechanism consists
> >of qualified people *just* pressing *one* button.
> >(I'm just offering this as an idea--I'm not saying
> >that it's *definitely* what we should do.  But I do
> >strongly feel it should be that simple, or
> >nearly that simple.  Once we determine the venue,
> >we can discuss the details fo the mechanism.)
> >
> >Larry
>
> Wow Larry, I really like this idea. It is simple,
> fast, easy, doesn't require freezing of a Wikipedia
> article during a review and most importantly it would
> not represent a version fork.

Yes, this is really important to me, so let me explain why.  From the very
beginning we were encouraging people to move articles from Wikipedia to
Nupedia--nobody did it.  If we were to propose doing that again now, I
can't see why it would be significantly different from before.  To be
sure, a revitalized Nupedia could be greatly simplified; but I think it's
pretty safe to say that Nupedians will insist on being on more than just a
subset of Wikipedia.  But in that case, if we had a greatly-simplified
Nupedia just borrowing articles from Wikipedia, and also adding articles
of its own, running a parallel project, that would be great, but because
it *would* be a different project (I don't like the word "fork" in this
context), Wikipedia would still probably have grounds for a certification
process of its own.  It couldn't *predict* that Nupedia would serve as a
"best of" Wikipedia; a revitalized, simplified Nupedia might simply ignore
Wikipedia, as it did before, when Nupedia was active.

The present proposal is to create a functionally and editorially
independent project that *only* uploads selected Wikipedia articles, and
does not change them at all.

> There could even be a
> second level pass by somebody else with even higher
> qualifications.

That's sort of what I thought Nupedia could do.

> They would review the Wikipedia
> article sometime after the first reviewer, make some
> needed changes (possibly reverting some less than
> stellar edits since the last review), click a button
> and presto!
>
> I have a Bachelors degree in Biology with an
> unofficial concentration in microbiology so sign me up
> to review some basic biology and microbiology
> articles. There would be criteria for a reviewer to
> follow, right? We need to work this stuff out. I
> suggest we create a Metapedia page to work-out some
> details. I would like to also go over Nupedia's review
> guidelines and see if we can get some good ideas on
> what to do and not to do from that. We also need to
> dig-up your original mailing list post on this subject
> in the archives. There were some great posts made
> during the great beta/stable debate several months ago
> that should also be mined for ideas.

I'm sure we could learn something that way.  An essential aspect of the
project as I conceived of it is that it would be potentially attractive to
college professors who want to work with colleagues and who do not want to
have to debate (or check up on) changes made by people whom they think
aren't yet their equals in terms of qualifications or ability.  The entry
bar would therefore necessarily have to be high in terms of
qualifications.  I think all this entails that, for planning purposes,
once we have decided we're really going to do this (and I at least am
pretty sure I want to get behind it), we should set up a separate mailing
list for the project.  It's only appropriate that the project be more
specifically defined, and guided, by the future participants.

But these things (the new mailing list included) is contingent to a
certain extent upon Jimbo's intentions vis-a-vis Nupedia itself.  I hope
we'll hear more from him about all of this.  He's probably out having fun
on the weekend now, as usual, so we might not hear from him about this for
a few days.

Larry