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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.'"
People on Slashdot should also have to prove that they are "Professor Know-it-alls, PHD" that they claim to be.
Wonder how many of them will turn out to be just some 24 year old from Kentucky.
Help! I've fallen in a karma hole and I can't get up!
I don't know what everyone was so upset about in the first place. Why would anyone trust unverified claims in the first place? His claimed to be a tenured professor "at a private university." If you won't name your university, my bullshit detector goes off, and I assume you're from either a po-dunk univeristy that isn't accredited or is just completely made up.
If it's not verifiable or reproducable, any scholar should automatically distrust it. Let people claim what they want.
I have four PhDs in theology, sociology, psychology, and nuclear physics, so I feel I'm qualified to answer this question.
The beginning philosophy of Wikipedia was that everyone had something to contribute to human knowledge, and credentials (the sort of things that get you opportunities to publish in respected journals) should not matter as much as the accuracy of your statements.
Now, though, it seems like they only feel like that if you lie about your credentials. This seems fine, except that the only reason you would care if someone lied about their credentials is if you felt that readers would automatically give their opinions more weight because of their (false) credentials. Is this a tacit admission that the "content over credentials" philosophy doesn't actually work in the real world? There is certainly an argument to be made.
Wales' proposal is at [[User:Jimbo Wales/Credential Verification]].
1. no anon edits. They're almost always just vandalism and frankly how can you trust information supplied without credentials?
2. Lock articles once they're solid. I watch about 20 pages and almost all of them have dozens of revisions a day, all of which is to undue vandalism. People like Jim Carrey (for instance) are not making news daily. Just lock the damn article, then when someone proposes something new to add in the discussion page, unlock it and add it. That is, discussion pages should be unlocked, and stable articles should be locked.
3. community == good, disorder == bad. We can't have an orderly encyclopedia if anyone and everyone can edit the content. Sorry, them's the facts.
4. Derive clear policies concerning articles about commercial entities. Often, an article about a company amounts to nothing more than a single paragraph and a link to their products/homepage. When you try to confront them about spammin wiki they counter with all sorts of allegations of bias, double standards, etc.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
- Used to run a porn site?
- Deleted from the records his own statement that his birth certificate was incorrect, two years later, and then got pissy about people who were quoting that statement?
- Encourages wikipedia admins to ban anyone who disagrees with them on content as a "troll"?
- Called one of his detractors a "disease" in your IRC channels, then denied he said it (even though it was logged) and created an entire "biography" on the person devoted solely to libeling them, in violation of publication laws and wikipedia's own "standards" for biographical entries?
- Suggested in logged, publicly available email lists for the project that "lone wolves" should start filing dishonest "complaints" with the hosting ISP against a site critical of wikipedia admins' behavior?
- Does nothing when false reports are filed by admins using the "advanced" tools like CheckUser, or when admins engage in stalking behavior or worse?
- Claims now to be the "sole founder" of Wikipedia, even though years of Wikipedia's own press releases show otherwise, since they credited Larry Sanger as "co-founder" or "one of the founders" for years prior to his creating Citizendium out of disgust for the cronyism and corruption in Wikipedia?
- Makes tons of money "sharing" Wikipedia's content to sites like Answer.com for a cut of the advertising revenue, then fraudulently claims that the site needs more money to run?
Sorry. Wikipedia's doomed. Doesn't matter what kind of damage control Jimbo tries now, he's corrupt, the admins are corrupt, the system is corrupt, and that's that.
to support using other sources, to claim that other sources were not proper, and to push his own (anti-Catholic biased) agenda in editing.
That's why this is such a big deal.
He also claimed the credentials as "proof" of his maturity and trustworthiness to handle a lot of the business that went on. This despite his being one of Wikipedia's very corrupt administrators' circle and routinely granting support to obviously corrupt behavior by others.
This is fine.
If you post an opinion, and point out that actually, you have some basis for your comment, such as an academic qualification, then you are assumed to know more about your relevant field than the 'Man on the Street'.
If a friend of mine who has a PhD in Nuclear Physics is having a discussion with someone, and it strays into his subject area, I will tend to assume he's the one who's right, simple because he _has_ spent a lot of year studying the subject.
If my workmate who flys a helpdesk tells me that I'm looking a bit funny, and might have cancer, I will give it a fairly minimal amount of credence. If my GP says the same, then I will listen.
I don't care overly if you have a degree in theology or not, if I'm arguing religion down the pub. However, if you claim 'basis' for the weight of your arguments that don't exist, then I will be very annoyed, and feel as though I've been lied to.
In fact, it was his 4th edit ever (backing up his 1st edit) that he first used his fake credentials to win a dispute. That implies that he created the fake credentials for that reason in the first place (a claim he denies).
Of the many experts of all things Sonic the Hedgehog?
How am I supposed to know for sure if Knuckles really is a "big fag with a boner for tails", or if Big the Cat is "totally awesome".
Wikipedia is a joke. Look up Knuckles the Echidna, then look up William Shakespeare, and see where our society ranks on an intellectual level of 1-10.
I used to think it was a great idea. At this point, I wouldn't trust anything I read in there to be true. I was looking up some stuff about hydrocarbons, alternate fuels, etc, out of pure curiosity w.r.t the science behind some of it, and found nothing but moronic defacement and rants about Bush, kyoto, etc.
Require credentials and end Wikipedia. I sincerely doubt that any of the editors or contributors have any credentials. Those types of folks tend to get published in real world journals, magazines and books.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The more people know about Wikipedia, the more things like this are going to be exposed.
Eventually, the corruption will be too much, and Wikipedia as it now exists will cease to be. There may be something called wikipedia down the road, but the grand scheme - the idea of an encyclopedia in which errors are corrected by a horde of readers who see something wrong and fix it - can't function as long as those who have true editorial control, the administrators, are a hopelessly corrupt group of individuals led by another hopelessly corrupt individual.
Wikipedia's hordes of corrupt administrators already make more enemies than friends every day for the project. Actions they take like banning their critics, making the appeals processes that are supposed to hold the administrators a non-public affair (they recently "closed" membership of their unblock-en-l list for one example), and rigidly enforcing a group of shibboleths which if a user does not speak, they will not be given the time of day? Not going to work.
It is in the nature of power to corrupt; wikipedia's problem is that they gave power to already-corrupt people, and all the power has done is just made them even worse.