Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Blessings

The Endorsement Editions Project aims to give experts in each field the tools to review articles in their area of expertise and "endorse" particular revisions as meeting their standard of judgement.

Rather than forcing a particular view on readers, it allows groups that trust one another's judgment to share the responsibility for 'endorsing' good editions of a certain set/category of articles, and allows readers to choose a set of endorsements to show by default, in place of the latest edition, if such an endorsement edition exists in an article's history.

This enables, say, a historian of Africa to set out to bring the articles on African history up to a high standard, and to recruit his colleagues to join him, knowing that the high-quality pages they leave behind will remain findable and identifiable as "endorsed" by other historians of Africa, even as later editors make further (less carefully reviewed) changes to the article.

Many groups, one endorsement
Endorsements should be by topic; with the possibility of breaking a topic into subtopics as the number and specificity of interested groups grows. [for instance, see the division of stubs into ever-more specialized stub subsets; at which point the groups informed about how to make stub classifications change.]

Groups are organized by association and social and bureaucratic circles. So the association of science teachers might be one of a dozen groups able to apply a physics blessing, but would be the only group qualified to add or remove its own members.

Groups can ask for and be recognized as able to apply endorsements. The AST might be qualified to apply both physics and biology endorsements; though after a series of mistakes in biology, might stop applying the biology endorsement to articles.

However, some governments do not allow such endorsement, as has recently come to our attention, so endorse with caution.

Other ideas
More points to be expanded and organized on a later round of editing this page (with some redundancy among them for now):


 * interface nicety : if you edit an endorsed article, it should automatically keep any endorsement that you are able to bestow (since you're expected not to decrease the usefulness)
 * interface2: if you can bestow an endorsement that an article has recently had (but has lost due to others editing it in the interim), visiting the page should note this and encourage you to check and reendorse it. Ditto editing the page...
 * addresses perennial concern academics (legitimately) have: their work and their approval won't be folded up into a discussion among non-experts about the right version, rather whatever revision they prefer to assign their seal of approval to, they can.
 * enables a specialist in one field to go out and make a difference in that field, without worrying about progress toward 1.0 in the encyclopedia at large; again makes it easier to attract experts to help out
 * in some fields (e.g. math) we've been very successful at getting experts to contribute excellent articles; if we give them a way to say "yes, a mathematician agrees with everything in this article", they'll jump on it.
 * the trouble that many users have with Wikipedia is that while it's an excellent resource to get background on a topic, it's difficult to find any person of whom to say "So-and-so said or approved X"---and attribution to a person is what ultimately gives authority to a source and makes it possible to use it in backing up a claim against even mild doubt. (One can go back in the history and look for who added X, but the answer is typically an IP address or an opaque username.) And, so long as no person can be found to stand behind a Wikipedia article, it can't be cited in academia. This will enable experts to fix this in their own fields by publicly standing behind articles.