stvrtg wrote:
On 3/2/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
he lied about having a high degree of education, used that high degree of education as leverage, and quite possibly lied regarding why he created the trumped-up persona as well. Not that he ever had to trump up his creds to achieve the same goal, of course, which is the other problem.
Nor would there be much of a way he could accomplish this if he wrote things about which he didnt know or understand. I agree that it seems improper to represent oneself as an expert to gain weight. But theres a paradox here: A site that owes its existence in part to its anti-credentialist ethos is all of a sudden to now supposed to conform to a credentialist modality when its unpaid participants interact with the "national media"? (below). The real reason people are upset is because noone with credentials could tell, even in spite of his attaining a position as a "respected authority" on Catholic subjects. Are our experts on trains supposed to have engineering degrees now? Is the credibility of the site somehow diminished due to one editor's mistake in misrepresenting himself? Nonsense.
I very strongly agree with stvrtg. This has been an incredible exercise in making a mountain out of a molehill. We have verifiability standards for article pages. We do not have them for user pages, and it does not strike me as irregular that a fictitious persona would have a fictitious biography. That is perfectly consistent with a view that what matters is the content, and not the qualifications of the person who put up the contents. If I see that someone who has contributed lists himself as a PhD I can say to myself, "That's nice," but I should not use that as an excuse to turn my brain off. What makes a claim here that an edit is made by a PhD any more credible than a claim by a highschool student using Wikipedia as a reference. We are not immune from such amateurish fallacies.
Did EssJay lever his stated credentials into a position of authority? I don't know. Unless there is clear evidence that Wikipedians were massively influenced by such claims as a basis for supporting his promotions those arguing that point now are only doing so with the benefit of hindsight. Now that we see "the truth" there is a massive rush to look for scapegoats for our own stupidity in taking such a claim seriously. We need a Lord of the Flies to whom we can pay homage. Brilliant minds often forget how close to the surface lies the descent to barbarism.
Should EssJay have revealed the truth about himself? Perhaps. But when? And how should that transition be made? I hardly see the need to retroactively correct all the inaccuracies of the last two years. I see the real biography on Wikia as a good faith attempt to begin setting the record straight. It should be viewed in that way, and not as an excuse for digging up every bit of dirt on EssJay for the last two years.
Instead of making a mountain out of a molehill when such issues come up we really need a mechanism to get over it.
Ec