William Pietri william@scissor.com writes:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
I find myself looking on it as "foolish" rather than
"unacceptable".
There *are* stalkers and freaks who go after WP editors [...]
While that is all absolutely true, it doesn't explain why he
chose a
fake identity with a PhD and a tenured professorship. I can't
see any
reason for that other than to get people to respect him more,
which is
rather disappointing, to say the least. I take anything someone
says
about themselves under a pseudonym with a pinch of salt, but I
still
wouldn't expect that kind of deception.
That's a great point.
Does anybody have numbers handy on his areas of contribution? If
he
never worked on the articles that he claimed false credentials
in, then
it would be a different thing for me.
William
Hard to say. He doesn't do too much in the main namespace, and most of that is reversion or related to administrative tasks (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=Essjay&namespace=0); if one wanted to find that sort of thing, one can look at his early contributions (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20050803105743&limit=500&target=Essjay&namespace=0) where quite a few edits related to ecclesiastical articles are listed. This of course in no wise proves that he abused his faux authority or anything - but on that note, a subpage of his (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay/Letter) makes for interesting reading.