[Wikipedia-l] Re: Erik's team certification proposal

Mon Nov 18 09:54:19 UTC 2002

> I'm still seeing way too many similarities between having multiple themed 
> Sifter groups and Erik's team certification proposal. What is the putpose
> of 
> Erik's idea? From what I gather it is to create selections of articles
> that 
> have been reviewed by different groups. Each group would have its own
> rules 
> on certification and on who they decide should be group members. These 
> members would "certify" certain articles based upon those criteria and
> then a 
> list of articles certified by any particular group would be automatically 
> generated. Heck, this can be done right now without any change to the 
> software so long as group members manually added articles to a list. 

Actually, what I proposed is very similar to what you propose:
- Every user has a list of trusted teams.
- There may be a default team that is trusted by all users, possibly the one
that applies the most rigid certification criteria.
- When a user views an article, he gets a notification:

 "This article has been certified by Team X"
 "An [[older version]] of this article has been certified by Team X"
 "This article has been certified by Teams X, Y, and Z"

-- depending on whether the article has been changed or not since the
certification, and on whether several teams have certified it or just one. Only
teams trusted by the user would be listed here. It would be possible, as you
suggest, to show the differences between the older version and the new,
uncertified one (which is easiest if both versions are stored in the same database).

Furthermore, in order to solve the problem of stumbling across uncertified
content even if you don't want to, I have suggested to give the user the
option to view the entire Wikipedia in a mode where only articles certified by at
least one team are displayed. This would allow all types of filtering,
including the family filters that some people want.

My proposal has several advantages over a simple static HTML sifter:

- Teams can work according to different criteria. They can certify high
quality articles, low quality ones, factually correct ones, stylistically correct
ones, neutrally written ones etc. With different rules and different goals,
they would be open not just to certified experts but to anyone who wants to
take part in the quality selection process.

- It gives users the option to have both the advantages of certification and
to enjoy Wikipedia as a huge, dynamic project -- it is part of the editing
process, not separate from it. Certification, by default, is only an
indicator, not a filter.

- It allows the combination of approval criteria (several trusted teams) for
indication and filtering, something that is only possible if the filtering
is done within Wikipedia. 

- It makes it possible for a team culture to grow and thrive within
Wikipedia (instead of requiring users to join separate sifter projects), thereby
greatly increasing the potential size of the effort. It's a very wiki-ish idea
because it relies a lot on social interaction.

The idea does not contradict the Sifter project, every team could define a
static HTML repository where its certified articles are stored as Larry
suggested.

Note that my original proposal was posted to the wikitech list and only
forwarded here in part. It is here:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-October/001089.html

Regards,

Erik

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