Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia May Require Proof of Credentials
narramissic writes "According to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a new policy is currently under discussion by the community of users who regularly write and maintain Wikipedia that would require contributors to the site who claim certain credentials to prove they really have them. The new policy comes after one of Wikipedia's most prolific and respected editors, who went by the pseudonym 'Essjay,' was found not to be the 'tenured professor of theology' he claimed to be but a run-of-the-mill 24 year-old from Kentucky. Said Wales, 'To discover that someone had been deceiving the community for a long time really was a bit of a blow to our trust. Wikipedia is built on the idea of trusting other people and people being honest and we find that in the most part everyone is, so it was a real disappointment.'"
You do realize that it's possible to weave a lie by telling the perfectly-cited truth......
Google for "Noam Chomsky" to get some good examples.
Why would it matter if "credentials" were accurate, if the information provided by said person(s) was accurate and worthwhile?
After going through Essjay's edits, it was clear that he was using his "tenured position" to influence edit wars.
And so it seems, the real solution to Wikipedia's problem is to not give a shit about someones real or imagined credentials. If you are wrong, it does not matter if you are a Nobel Prize laurate or not, you are still wrong. But as usual, Wikipedia solves its problems completely backwards. I suspect that this policy will be quickly dismissed when someone like Noam Chomsky comes around and decides to expose the right-wing slant in Wikipedias articles.
Football Odds
Because it requires someone with some kind of credentials to determine if the information is worthwhile or accurate. That's the whole point of requiring credentials. The whole "thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters working for a thousand years" thing isn't really working out for Wikipedia. Those monkeys are still, by and large, producing gibberish, and not any works of Shakespeare, as the naive founders of Wikipedia were hoping would happen.
I don't respond to AC's.
"I have four PhDs in theology, sociology, psychology, and nuclear physics, so I feel I'm qualified to answer this question." Really? So spending your entire life reading about life makes you somehow more qualified than the rest of us who live it? Bollocks. Try getting out and experiencing life for a change
Wish I could agree with your conclusion, but corrupt != doomed. If that were so, the UN building would have been turned into low-income housing by now. But if we're lucky, a better project will just take all of WP's GFDL and make an actual encyclopedia with it.
But what do I know? I'm only a 24 year-old Kentucky native who -- no wait, I'm from Wisconsin and I've almost completed my second Master's program! Dang, I always get that wrong!
Uh, moderators... This story is about the requirement for verifying identification in an online context, and about the difficulty of sometimes doing so.
How is my posting off topic? Wikipedia isn't the only site that has (or will have) this problem...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.