Editing Encyclopedia:Historical archive/Policy/Approval mechanism (section)

===Proposed basic requirements===

Among the basic requirements of an approval mechanism would have to fulfill in order to be adequate are:
* The approval must be done by ''experts'' about the material approved. ''A [[Wikipedia:Trust model|trust model]]?''
* There must be clear and reasonably stringent standards that the experts are expected to apply.
* The mechanism itself must be genuinely ''easy'' for the experts to use or follow. ''[[Nupedia]]'s experience seems to show that a convoluted approval procedure, while it might be rigorous, is too slow to be of ''practical'' use.''
* The approval mechanism ''must not'' impede the progress of Wikipedia in any way. ''It must not change the Wikipedia process; it should be an "add-on".''
* Must not be a bear to program, and it shouldn't require extra software or rely on browser-specific stuff like Java (or Javascript) that some users won't have. ''A common browser platform standard must be specified for them, preferably low level but not so low level that the machines don't have CDs.''
* Must provide some way of verifying the expert's [[blind credential|credentials]]&mdash;and optionally ''a way to verify that ''he or she'' approved the article, not an imposter.''

Some results we might want from an approval system are that it:
* makes it possible to broaden or narrow the selection of approvers (E.g., one person might only wish authors who have phd's, another would allow for anyone who has made an effort to approve any articles.),
* allows for extracting topic-oriented sets (e.g., in order to produce an "Encyclopedia of Music") (The idea is that article approval could contain more information than just the binary "high-quality" bit, e.g. topic area, level of detail, and so forth.  Such "approved metadata" would allow easy extraction of user-defined subsets of the full approved article set.), and
* provides a framework for allowing multiple sets of "approvals", allow not just one set of ''approvers'' or one ''approval rating'' but different sets to allow for different standards. (I.e. as with consumer products, different safety approvals, scuba diving certifications, etc.)