[Wikipedia-l] An idea

[David Gerard]

Jimmy Wales (jwales at wikia.com) [050524 22:58]:

> I had an idea the other day while I was on a radio interview.
> Someone was making the usual (uninformed) complaint about Wikipedia that
> we "pretend to have no authors" -- which is nonsense of course -- but
> the undertone (in my opinion) of the criticism was that Wikipedia is
> written by a bunch of random morons on the Internet rather than Real
> Professionals.  As such, it is argued, it's a perfectly fun forum for
> people to post their stupid rants, but it is not an encyclopedia.
 

"How do you respond to her argument?"
"I find it hard to respond to because I can't make any sense of it."


> Some years ago, Amazon.com instituted a system that they were calling
> something like "Real Names intitiative" for user reviews.  In order to
> increase the public perception of trust in those reviews, they made it
> possible (but optional!) for people to go through a process to identify
> themselves by their Real Names.
> We could do something similar, but also allow for the inclusion of
> credentials.  People could *optionally* go through a process to confirm
> their credentials.  When you do this, a small icon appears by your name
> in the edit history, and when you click on it, you get to a new tab of
> the user page, which contains a list of the confirmed credentials.


I dunno about icons in article history, but encouraging people more to list
that sort of thing on user pages would be really good. There's a template
for languages spoken and to what degree; that system could be extended.
Put the templates in appropriate Wikipedia subcategories and you have
instant handy directories of expertise in particular matters.


- d.