Wikipedia debacle spurs changes
p2pnet.net news:- Wikipedia ‘expert’ Ryan Jordan’s claims of having theological degrees turned out to be false.
A, “24-year-old from Kentucky with no advanced degrees,” he used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies, “to help him correct articles on the penitential rite or transubstantiation,” said The Telegraph, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the Times Online he was “personally saddened” and, “confessed that he did not take the issue as seriously as he should have done”.
Now he’s changing the way things are done.
Contributors will still be able to remain anonymous, says Associated Press, quoting him, but, “he said they should only be allowed to cite some professional expertise in a subject if those credentials have been verified”.
Jordan’s fraud, “came to light last week when The New Yorker published an editor’s note stating that a 2006 Wikipedia profile in the magazine had erroneously described Essjay’s purported academic resume. The New Yorker said a Wikipedia higher-up had vouched for Essjay to the author of the piece, Stacy Schiff, but that neither knew Essjay’s real identity.”
Jordan had recently been promoted to arbitrator, “a position for trusted members of the community,” and had also been hired Wikia Inc, a for-profit venture run by Wales, says AP, adding Jordan had since been dismissed.
In a User Talk post, Wales says:
In response to the EssJay scandal, I want to bring back an old proposal of mine from 2 years ago for greater accountability around credentials:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/022085.html
At the time, this seemed like a plausibly decent idea to me, and the reaction at the time was mostly positive, with some reasonable caveats and improvements:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/thread.html to read the entire thread of “An idea”.
Nowadays, I bring back the proposal for further consideration in light of the EssJay scandal. I think it imperative that we make some positive moves here… we have a real opportunity here to move the quality of Wikipedia forward by doing something that many have vaguely thought to be a reasonably good idea if worked out carefully.
For anyone who is reading but not online, I will sum it up. I made a proposal that we have a system whereby people who are willing to verify their real name and credentials are allowed a special notification. “Verified Credentials”. This could be a rather open ended system, and optional.
The point is to make sure that people are being honest with us and with the general public. If you don’t care to tell us that you are a PhD (or that you are not), then that’s fine: your editing stands or falls on its own merit. But if you do care to represent yourself as something, you have to be able to prove it.
This policy will be coupled with a policy of gentle (or firm) discouragement for people to make claims like those that EssJay made, unless they are willing to back them up.
Stay tuned.
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