here’s the idea: those with an expertise in a certain discipline (tenured professors for the most part. probably. at least initially) are identified and given special permissions for wikipedia pages that relate to their discipline. In addition to making normal edits, they can add a “stamp of approval” to a specific version of an article. Basically, they take the article in whole and look at it the same way that they look at the articles that they peer-review for journals in their field (i’ve been told that most professors do this for free?). They make any edits that they feel need to be made to secure the factual integrity of the article, then they attach the stamp. As soon as someone else, without special “scholarly” permissions makes an edit to the page, the new version doesn’t have the stamp.

But wikipedia keeps the stamped version, so if a student or professor wants to cite a wikipedia article as a source, or if someone just thinks that everyone on the internet is stupid, they can click a link to see the “scholarly” version of the article (probably a few revisions old, perhaps less up-to-date, but certainly spam-free and factually accurate). the people with “scholar” permissions for an article check the revisions on that article and either approve all of them (bringing the thumbs-up to the latest version) or they just take the article as a whole again and peer-review it from scratch. The “scholarly” version of an article will be more recent if more academics are actively reviewing. Also, perhaps it takes two “thumbs-up”s in order for an article to be promoted to “scholarly”

this would be an additional layer added to wikipedia, with no effect on the actual public articles. the scholarly version of an article is accessible, but the “normal” one is the first one that the user sees. on the “normal” article, edits made by scholars can be freely changed by non-scholars. scholars don’t “trump” non-scholars (though admins do). The only difference is that in addition to making edits, scholars can add the stamp of approval, or thumbs-up.

i’ve bounced this idea off a few people. one concern that was raised was the overhead involved in finding and confirming the identities of these scholars. certainly this would involve a non-negligible amount of work. the question of how to confirm that people on the internet are who they say they are is a bit of a toughey, but people have been working on this for years and come up with some reasonable solutions. tonyb suggested that this might inform the solution? Further, there’s the question of how to confirm that people have the degrees that they say they do. I think the answer to this one is easy: let their affiliates do that for us. If MIT says that professor X has degree Y from institution Z, take their word for it. Once in awhile they’ll be wrong, but we couldn’t hope to do better ourselves. But the concern with overhead of wikipedia employees (or lack thereof) is a legitimate one. also, it’s possible that this idea is contrary enough to wikipedia’s mission and goals that it should really be a service that is outsource. Luckily, wikipedia’s database of articles is available for free, and so is it’s software (the great majority of it, anyway). So the coordination of scholars could be done elsewhere and the scholarly versions of article stored somewhere else. With the help of a simple firefox extension, the integration with wikipedia could still be very tight.

and that is my crazy idea. it’s very likely that someone has already come up with this idea. maybe someone has tried to implement it? drop me a line if you know of someone else whose playing with this stupid idea.

excuse me for the lack of proofreading. i’m going to go to sleep now, and hopefully i will edit this tomorrow.

for now, please enjoy this poorly worded stupid idea!