senior editors and baseline quality
I did not say it was a very palatable idea, all I said was that it was the approach that would be most likely to achieve the desired results.
Basically there appear to be the following methods of selecting:
- open election
- a test to be filled in
- a number of edits to be made
- the human eye
As you pointed out open election will tend to be about popularity. It will be impossible to design a test that checks for anything but smartness and knowledge (a willingness to cheat will help pass the test). Obviously it is not hard at all to run up 10.000 edits or so without adding even a bit of content or showing anything but a drive to make edits.
As what we want is proven commitment to core values (plus proven ability), there is no substitute for the human eye (also basic to the whole idea of Wikipedia as opposed to something that is gathered by a bot or algorithm), the best way to check for the qualities wanted are other senior editors (it takes one to know one); second best would be to accept one of the existing mechanisms for checking for ability, that is having written FA-articles (plus perhaps a bit more). This is less than ideal, but better than anything else I have seen suggested. - Brya 04:46, 25 January 2010 (UTC)