Should PF Staff Disclose Their Credentials?

[J77]

Some people are pretty open about their education/qualifications/level of experience in industry; some, understandingly, wish to remain anonymous.

However, would it not be a good idea for the PF staff (particularly with respect to mentoring) to share these specific details in their profiles.

Perhaps they already do this -- tho' I can't remember seeing any such thing...

 

[marlon]

Does that really matter ? Personally, i don't think so because the only real criterion we can use to judge a poster's knowledge is the content of the posted messages.

I DO think however, we should have a PF Hall Of Fame to honor our past guru's.

marlon

 

[ranger]

While we're at it, we should get a few of them to come out of hiding

 

[Moonbear]

Some people are pretty open about their education/qualifications/level of experience in industry; some, understandingly, wish to remain anonymous.

However, would it not be a good idea for the PF staff (particularly with respect to mentoring) to share these specific details in their profiles.

Perhaps they already do this -- tho' I can't remember seeing any such thing...

The reason we don't do this is two-fold. The most important is that our goal here is to encourage open discussion and interaction without the intimidation of degrees and credentials. We use the science advisor medals to indicate people who have been consistently accurate in their responses here, and it doesn't really matter if they have a Ph.D. or are still a student, as long as they have the sense to know their limits and check their facts before posting.

The other part of it is that we really have no way to verify everyone's credentials. If someone says they're a professor, or high school teacher, or an engineer working for such and such company, unless they are making posts completely inconsistent with those claims that indicate they have far less knowledge in the field they purport to be their area of expertise, we pretty much just take it at face value.

There IS a reason many of us mentors opt to remain anonymous. We have acquired some crackpot enemies along the way when they've been banned. We have also banned some very unstable people (some of the posts that led to the bans have probably never been seen by the members, or by very few, before getting deleted), and the potential that some of these people could be violent is quite high. This is also why we try to catch posts where others include personally identifiable information...we've edited out email addresses from posts, for example. We can't completely stop people from doing this, and hope when they do so, it is with caution, but there really are quite a lot of predators on the internet, and we cannot stop them from reading posts here.