"Steven Ericsson Zenith" wrote
That is, every admin must necessarily have their
identity exposed and it
surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to
justify.
I'm surprised that you're surprised. I use my real name, but I respect the
reasons others do not.
Authority (in the sense of an encyclopedia) comes because the individuals
involved are transparent and respected in some conventional sense. Hidden
identity provides no basis for authority since the landscape of
individuals is unknown and the changes to that landscape impossible to
track. Such that, even if a group of anonymous admins is able to command
respect for a period, there is no guarantee, no way to judge, that a group
of admins have the same capacity in the future. Indeed, if the current
group of admins do manage to establish public confidence then the public
is immediately at risk since that group can be opaquely usurped.
The short end is that for the long term welfare of
Wikipedia admins - all
contributors - need to be transparent - otherwise Wikipedia is simply a
propaganda engine.
I don't follow you at all. We should put certain things in the disclaimer,
against giving WP undue authority. But if we had all real-name
contributions, we should have to put almost exactly those things in, anyway.
That the journal Nature should give any support to the scientific articles
in Wikipedia is a cause of great concern - since Wikipedia is not a
specialist encyclopedia they have by inference given unfounded credence to
the whole.
Concern to whom? What kind of support? They found a number of _mistakes_.
The fact is that Britannica has similar mistakes, just no so numerous.
Caveat emptor still applies. People shouldn't believe everything in the
newspapers, nor on Wikipedia. That doesn't make newspapers or Wikipedia
useless.
Charles