Josh Gordon wrote:
On 3/1/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
My hypothesis is that it depends on whether the information influences other people in course of our work.
That's a good way of framing it. I'm sure some obsessive or extremely curious person will go and pick through all of Essjay's interactions on talk pages on Catholic-related articles, and edits there, looking for evidence of negative effect.
That's definitely happening. This is the latest from the trawl, found by user Rcade:
"This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it's credibility."
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Imprimatur&diff=prev&...
This was 12 April 2005, so per Geni's dates, it's well before Brant turned up, and a month before he claimed the identity on his user page. It was his fourth edit, and backing up his very first edit. That pokes a pretty big hole in the just-throwing-the-stalkers-off claim.
This has to be very hard for somebody who has put so much into Wikipedia. I hope he takes this chance to own up to this and any other mistakes like this he's made on the project.
William