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

===Sanger's proposal===

:When I say the approval mechanism must be really easy for people to use, I mean it. I mean it should be extremely easy to use. So what's the easiest-to-use mechanism that we can devise that nevertheless meets the criteria?

:The following: on every page on the wiki, create a simple popup approval form that anyone may use. ("If you are a genuine expert on this subject, you can <u>approve this article</u>.") On this form, the would-be article approver [whom I'll call a "reviewer"] indicates name, affiliation, relevant degrees, web page (that we can use to check bona fides), and a text statement to the effect of what qualifications the person has to approve of an article. The person fills this out (with the information saved into their preferences) and hits the "approve" button.

:When two different reviewers have approved an article, if they are not already official reviewers, the approval goes into moderation.

:The approval goes into a moderation queue for the "approved articles" part of Wikipedia. From there, moderators can check over recently-approved articles. They can check that the reviewers actually are qualified (according to some pre-set criteria of qualification) and that they are who they say they are. (Perhaps moderator-viewable e-mail addresses will be used to check that a reviewer isn't impersonating someone.) A moderator can then "approve the approver".

:The role of the moderators is not to approve the article, but to make sure that the system isn't being abused by underqualified reviewers. A certain reviewer might be marked as not in need of moderation; if two such reviewers were to approve of an article, the approval would not need to be moderated.

:'''New addition'''  I think it might be a very good idea to list, on an approved article, who the reviewers are who have approved the article.

:--Larry Sanger

I think it would be a very good idea to list, on any article, the names of ANY reviewers to have reviewed the article. Seeing who disapproved it is, perhaps, more important than seeing who approved it, since Wikipedia generally has high quality articles anyway. [[User:Brianjd|Brian]][[User talk:Brianjd|j]][[Special:Contributions/Brianjd|d]] 10:22, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)