Folks,
Larry Sanger has weighed in on this on the Citizendium blog.
http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/03/01/wikipedia-firmly-supports-your-right-...
"Now this is very sad.
As Slashdot reports http://slashdot.org/articles/07/03/01/1313251.shtml, someone calling himself "Essjay" was interviewed for last year's *New Yorker * article about Wikipedia. At the time, he gave *The New Yorker* the same story he gave to the Wikipedia community: he was a tenured professor of theology with some very impressive degrees. Recently he revealed that he had been using a fake identity, and *The New Yorker* apologized to its readers http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060731fa_fact (see the bottom of the article, "Editors' Note") for having reporting his lies as fact. It turns out that, far from being an overeducated religious thinker, he is (if we believe his latest story–skepticism is obviously warranted) 24 years old and degreeless, a kid named Ryan Jordan. He also apparently thinks his lie was pretty clever, as well as quite morally justified, as edits on his user page show. Now, this is pathetic, and yet more evidence of the broad moral decline of Western civilization and all that is holy, but in itself is no big deal. No doubt Wikipedia's ranks are chock full of people who have misrepresented themselves. That's not big news, if you know much about Wikipedia.
No, the fascinating and tragic thing is Jimmy Wales' reaction. *The New Yorker* reported that he said: "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.""
There is much more where that came from. Sanger probably sees it as a fillip for Citizendium which was starting to look like the encyclopedia equivalent of *Chinese Democracy.*
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Democracy*
Regards to all,
*Keith Old*
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Jimmy, say it ain't so.