In the wake of the Essjay mess, Wikipedia’s long-time “anti-credentialist” philosophy is beginning to crack. Head Wikipedian Jimmy Wales proposed Monday that the online encyclopedia begin to verify and certify any academic or other credentials claimed by its authors. Writes Wales:

I think it imperative that we make some positive moves here… we have a real opportunity here to move the quality of Wikipedia forward by doing something that many have vaguely thought to be a reasonably good idea if worked out carefully … The point is to make sure that people are being honest with us and with the general public. If you don’t care to tell us that you are a PhD (or that you are not), then that’s fine: your editing stands or falls on its own merit. But if you do care to represent yourself as something, you have to be able to prove it. This policy will be coupled with a policy of gentle (or firm) discouragement for people to make claims like those that EssJay made, unless they are willing to back them up.

Wales notes that he made a similar proposal to adopt a “Verified Credentials” program two years ago. At the time, he argued:

people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are. Why should the world listen to us about anything? People think, and not unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that. As it turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential fetishists, there’s nothing particularly wrong with advertising that, hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons* after all.

Many of Wikipedia’s most eloquent advocates have argued that the encyclopedia’s practice of judging an author’s work solely on its own merits without being influenced by the author’s credentials is one of the project’s core strengths, both ideologically and practically. Recently, in comparing Wikipedia to Citizendium, a competing volunteer-written encyclopedia being organized by Wikipedia cofounder and apostate Larry Sanger, Clay Shirky wrote that Citizendium’s focus on establishing the expertise of contributors through their credentials would likely doom the effort:

The first order costs will come from the certification and deference itself. By proposing to recognize external credentialing mechanisms, Citizendium sets itself up to take on the expenses of determining thresholds and overlaps of expertise. A masters student in psychology doing work on human motivation may know more about behavioral economics than a Ph.D. in neo-classical economics. It would be easy to label them both experts, but on what grounds should their disputes be adjudicated?

On Wikipedia, the answer is simple — deference is to contributions, not to contributors, and is always provisional … Wikipedia certainly has management costs (all social systems do), but it has the advantage that those costs are internal, and much of the required oversight is enforced by moral suasion. It doesn’t take on the costs of forcing deference to experts because it doesn’t recognize the category of ‘expert’ as primitive in the system. Experts contribute to Wikipedia, but without requiring any special consideration.

Citizendium’s second order costs will come from policing the system as a whole. If the process of certification and enforcement of deference become even slightly annoying to the users, they will quickly become non-users. The same thing will happen if the projection of force needed to manage Citizendium delegitimizes the system in the eyes of the contributors.

While Wales’s proposal certainly doesn’t go as far as Sanger’s plan in embracing what Shirky calls “external credentialing mechanisms,” Wales’s proposal would explicitly “recognize” – and hence begin to give special consideration to – those external credentials (and the “experts” who hold them). No longer would “the answer” be “simple”; deference would begin to be granted to contributors, based on their academic degrees and other “verified” credentials, as well as to their contributions. A formal system of credentials would, inevitably, exert influence, especially since Wales himself ties the adoption of the system to improvements in the quality of the encyclopedia. And, as Wales admits in making the proposal, Wikipedia would face some of the costs and complexities of certification and policing that Shirky mentions. Indeed, with his proposal, Wales shifts himself in the direction of Sanger’s camp. Once you impose a credentialing system – even if it’s “optional” – you change the dynamic of an organization and set it on a new course. Credentialism is a slippery slope.

Of course, one thing that the Essjay scandal reveals is that credentials already play a strong role in Wikipedia’s putatively anti-credentialist society. Essjay’s great sin – the reason Wales ultimately sent him into exile – wasn’t that he lied to the press but that he hoodwinked his fellow Wikipedians, that he used his fake credentials to get them to grant him deference in editing articles. In making his proposal to adopt a formal credentialing process, Wales is simply underscoring what is now obvious: at Wikipedia, credentials matter, whether genuine or fake.

UPDATE (3/7): The Associated Press picks up on the story, with some quotes from Wales.