Ron Ritzman wrote:
On 3/1/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
While that is all absolutely true, it doesn't explain why he chose a fake identity with a PhD and a tenured professorship.
Yes, if he thought it was necessary to create a fake identity to protect himself then he should have given his alter ego an educational level similar to his own and a job at more or less the same social status as his real job.
So that means you would be OK with it if I used a pseudonym and claimed to have a PhD in biology, rather than computer science?
I wonder if some of this is just a belated horrified realization that Wikipedia can be exploited by the pseudonymous just as much as mySpace or any other website. I think I got jaded early on, when some pseudonyms claimed vast backgrounds that didn't jibe at all with their edits, and so now if someone doesn't supply a real name on the user page, I tend to treat the whole bio section as random noise ("tenured professor"? yeah whatever - real professors give specific ranks, if they qualify the term at all).
However, there is a long tradition of distinguished scholars using pseudonyms, and it's certainly a nice fantasy to imagine all the Nobelists secretly adding content under some of those funny names.
Stan