[Wikipedia-l] My approval mechanism ideas

Wed Sep 4 15:33:09 UTC 2002

Reading the postings on setting up an article approval system for 
Wikipedia, I had the following ideas (most elements of it have already 
been mentioned by others).

Even though experts are no guarantee for quality, the credibility of 
Wikipedia will grow as articles have been approved by field experts. 
Therefore, there should be a mechanism to nominate an article for 
approval by an expert (or more, if these are available); this should in 
a way similar to the old voting system, and should IMO only be possible 
by logged in users.

Experts are defined in two ways: field and nationality. This has the 
benefit that an article on, say, a German mathematician is not only 
verified by a mathematical expert, but also by somebody with knowledge 
of Germany, being able to check the spelling of names, cities and check 
local information (the mathematician's influence in Germany may be much 
bigger than in the rest of the world). While experts will know a great 
deal about their fields (mathematics, biology, philosophy), they 
probably have some smaller areas in which they're particularly 
knowledgable (logic, evolution theory, Nietzsche). When an article is 
submitted for approval, the submitted should indicate which general 
field the article is in, potentially specify the sub-field, and a 
country (if applicable). For example, the article on the German 
mathematician will be have : mathematics, sub-field trigonometry (f.e.), 
country Germany. This will cause the page to show up on the approval 
lists of the experts that have subscribed to one of these areas. An 
expert can than indicate if he wishes to review the article or not. If 
there are multiple experts willing to review, they can decide what 
approach to take (the country expert may f.e. let the math-man do most 
work and only check for names or so). After review, the experts may put 
the document back without approving it. In that case, they should 
indicate which elements are still missing in their opinion, and point 
out other deficiencies (probably in the talk page). Alternatively, the 
expert can decide to fix the current deficiencies and put the article 
back as approved, or may simply give the article approval without change.

After approval, the article should NOT be locked for editing, but the 
page should indicate that "this article is approved by an expert" or "a 
previous version of this article was approved by an expert", in case the 
article was edited since the last approval.

As for the admittance of experts, I think expert status should not just 
be given to people with lot of titles or the like. Actually, I think 
most of the current frequent editors, or at least the sysops, would 
already qualify as an expert in my view. Having finished a higher-level 
education on a specific subject, or even still studying is already some 
qualification. A proven record of quality edits to Wikipedia articles on 
the subject should be enough to get expert-status.

These are my ideas. They're still a bit of loose sand, and several 
problems are still not addressed (such as the issue of how we actually 
give people expert status), but I'd still like hear your reactions.

Jeroen Heijmans