Talk:Authority metric

I think the issue then becomes to what extent prestige in academia should translate to prestige within the community of wikipedia contributors. Frankly, in my experience, I would be reluctant to "ennoble" a professor of history to have special edit access to all history pages, as even within specialized fields (french history, etc) people generally spend their whole careers focusing on very narrow topics. An early modern french historian would not necessarily know more about De Gaulle than my uncle, a WWII buff, but according to this system, since he or she is a french historian with credentials, his/her opinion would count more or they would be granted greater access. I think what it boils down to is that standing in academia does not always translate to comprehensive knowledge, at least in the humanities. Perhaps in your field of physics it may be that in order to specialize you must have a strong foundation to build off of, otherwise you will not be successful. But when hyper-specialization is necessary to "distinguish" yourself in a humanities PhD program, often the sacrifice is the broad base of knowledge across the discipline. --JacquelineA 16:18, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It's the same in physics, I agree with you. Authority must be confined to a suitably narrow field. The authority structure of the site should mirror that of real life. -- Tim Starling 05:01, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)