New policy: Credentials of Wikipedia contributors must be verified if they want to win argument by playing the ‘Oh, yea, I went to Harvard’ card

Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales provides the quote of the day from an AP story about Wikipedia requiring verification of credentials by those who “cite” them: “It’s always inappropriate to try to win an argument by flashing your credentials,” Wales said, “and even more so if those credentials are inaccurate.” (This is a follow up to these previous posts: “Jimbo Wales decides faux-PhD should resign his â€œpositions of trustâ€ on Wikipedia” and “A Wikipedia oops? Or, a New Yorker oops?”.)

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About Rex Hammock

Founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., the content marketing and custom media services company based in Nashville, Tenn.

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http://www.netesq.com/ Internet Esquire

Superficially, the Essjay case was about falsified credentials; at its core, it was about an elaborate deception that Essjay rationalized as being necessary because he held positions of trust at Wikipedia. As I stated in a recent blog post – http://blog.xodp.org/2007/03/jimbo-wales-feeds-wikipedians-and.html – verifying credentials will not address the core issue of deception by Wikipedia administrators.