Joho the Blog
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I proposed something like this a year ago.

A hacker with more free time than myself could build this as some kind of proxy for Wikipedia, but they would have to work around one technical problem: while each previous version of a Wikipedia page has its own permanent URL, the most recent version does not.

That is, if the ACS's Wiki-Certifier reads the "Hydrogen" page on Wikipedia and decides that it's accurate, there's no way he can pass around a URL for that particular version of that page--until the page gets revised.

Bizarre gotcha. So, the certifier would have to do some meaningless edit to force a new rev. Wikipedia maybe should fix that.

For comers : my vegan cake was stable [and edible] at 18 inches. If this doesn't sound like a lot, try your hand at it :-)

Distributed authority is not my idea -- not in the 'stamp and seal' sense. And what I would like to see happen with research groups has been suggested by others before me; there is simply growing interest in it now. I want to make it easy for people who already work on and review content in a field to do so in a way that directly improves Wikipedia.

At the moment, individual authors 'adopt' certain articles and try to keep them fresh and free of errors. And various organizations maintain their own internal knowledge-bases with content that overlaps a good deal with relevant Wikipedia articles.

Rather than trying to hack an authority system into MediaWiki, you can do something simpler to encourage both of the above : have groups that maintain their own small clusters of articles -- 10 or 20 or 100 -- on a local wiki, with its own portal page. Give them an easy way to offer their work for merging with WP, without requiring them to all join the site. The edits they make are implicitly 'approved' by them.

This is not a good verification method within WP, however software changes are required for that (and Seth's suggestion is one specific path one might take). At the moment, Nature can link to revisions of 100 articles that they approve. But once you follow a link through to a Nature-edited revision of [[DNA]], and follow a link to another WP article, you've already returned to the realm of public editing.

The motivation for this is a few professors and talented writers who began editing on WP, but commented that editing Wikipedia directly can be offensive and off-putting (they are readily offended by trolling, and have no patience for even trivial wiki-lawyering).

SJ

PS - Seth: In the latest versions of MediaWiki, there are permanent links to the current revision of every page -- see the "Permanent link" hyperlink in the sidebar on Wikipedia. [someone was posting to the research mailing list not knowing this just yesterday; the link should really be made more prominent!]

Have you read the policies of wikipedia? If you don't like being criticized, edited and stomped, DON'T POST THERE!. Want your thoughts to remain untouched? Publish a book.. Don't have money... you unlucky... jajaja

There's one non-meaningless edit that can be done, if you insist: This previous version of This article is avaled by blablabla... I doubt somebody will remove such an important landmark in the article...

Have you read the policies of wikipedia? If you don't like being criticized, edited and stomped, DON'T POST THERE!. Want your thoughts to remain untouched? Publish a book.. Don't have money... you unlucky... jajaja

There's one non-meaningless edit that can be done, if you insist: This previous version of This article is avaled by blablabla... I doubt somebody will remove such an important landmark in the article...

Not that it is hugely important, but wikipedia is licensed under the GFDL not creative commons.

A trusted authority simply needs to identify a version of the Wikipedia page they "approve" of (this might involve editing it so they are happy with it's quality). They then add an external link from the Wikipedia page to an non-wiki, secure page on their site. A simple redirect link back to the version of the wikipedia page they approve of should work fine.