On Sat, 3 Mar 2007, stvrtg wrote:
I think most people agree that what Essjay did was a mistake.
That's like saying that most people agree that a hurricane is a breeze.
But I dislike people who find it easy to dismiss someone's years of good work on the basis of a mistake, and moreso if that dismissal rests on some inflated concept about what that mistake was or means.
Think of it as a years-long mistake. Or think of it as a continually- occurring series of mistakes that happened for those years, not just a single mistake.
And a "mistake" is generally something done inadvertently. Calling this a "mistake" tends to absolve him of blame.