I will consider criticism of Essjay particularly valid when it is accompanied by a general call to eliminate pseudonymous editing of Wikipedia. The vast majority of editors on Wikipedia are anonymous, and I'm sure they have their various reasons, but anyone whose persona is not congruent with their real personality is doing exactly what Essjay did, on one level or another. I don't expect a lot of support for this position, but it's the logical extension of the outcry against Essjay's charade. On 3/1/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote: -- --jpgordon ∇∆∇∆

Those two observations seem inconsistent with each other. Newyorkbrad

On 3/1/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually this matter has been brewing for some time. Amazing it took this long to bring attention to it.

Josh Gordon wrote: It's actually a really interesting thing to think about. Why *does* it matter whether a pseudonym's user page says untrue things? It's intrinsically unverifiable, after all. And in the same vein, what if there were untrue things on *my* page, which is easily tied to a real-life person? Would it be a problem if it turned out that I hadn't quite completed my PhD? (Remember the admiral who purportedly committed suicide because some of his medals weren't valid? He was sure his whole career was over.) What if my user page said my favorite color was green, when it's actually blue? What if somebody from WP Review calls up a family member on the phone (that being their style), and then reveals my dastardly color deception? My hypothesis is that it depends on whether the information influences other people in course of our work. Even though we're supposedly all about the content and not who adds it, we still factor in what we think we know about the editor. When I think someone is a theology professor, I'm going to defer a bit in article edits, or spend more time researching before arguing a point of Catholicism. So I've been cheated if that person is not really as knowledgeable as claimed. I would feel cheated even if the false claim was merely to have read a particular book; I will have edited on the wrong assumption that the book informed the other person's work. Conversely, if I'm found to be lying outrageously about my color preference, no one would care. Review 40K+ edits to look for evidence of color chicanery? Not too likely! A few might take it as evidence of general untrustworthiness, but if on a talk page someone said "that guy lied about his color preference, how can we ever trust him again!", I don't think it would be taken as a license to revert all my past and present edits; instead people just go back to the default process of evaluating content on its own merits. Stan

On 3/1/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote: That's a good way of framing it. I'm sure some obsessive or extremely curious person will go and pick through all of Essjay's interactions on talk pages on Catholic-related articles, and edits there, looking for evidence of negative effect. But basically what seems to be upsetting people most is not that Essjay established the persona, but that he stayed in character when approached by the press. Really, it's the New Yorker that should be embarassed here; they didn't fact check the identity of someone they only knew online. Lots of people make that mistake, once. -- --jpgordon ∇∆∇∆

... and promptly http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Essjay&curid=506819…2011reverted. Sigh, edit war coming? On 02/03/07, NSLE (Wikipedia) <nsle.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 3/1/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)earthlink.net> wrote: Woof. -- --jpgordon ∇∆∇∆

William Pietri wrote: "Should you run across a theology contribution from me, it is important to remember that I am a Catholic scholar, not a Catholic." With a statement like that on his user page, he's practically asking for it. -- Tariq Ab- Jo- Tu-

"NSLE (Wikipedia)" <nsle.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> writes: just no-one Is that so really easy to spot? I don't believe it is, except with the benefit of hindsight. When I go to [[canon law]], I see "Canon law is the term used for the internal ecclesiastical law which governs various churches, most notably the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Anglican Communion of churches." Now, this doesn't directly say that 'canon law' with reference to Essjay *must* be referring specifically to the Roman Catholic Church, and it's easy to forget that most Catholic literature is in Latin even now - I know that it is very easy for even Catholics to forget that most historical Church literature is Latin (as my family is Catholic, if I may claim some personal experience in this matter). Indeed, I myself sometimes forget this, such as when I go to read a Papal encyclical and unawares am taken to the official English translation, never noticing the fine print saying the original is in Latin. Even if I were to consider this, I still couldn't be sure that this is a contradiction: maybe canon law degrees just don't require that much expertise in Latin, or maybe a modern canon law degree deals with Greek and Aramaic texts primarily, or maybe they can just use translations or English originals these days. Even if I were a ultra-curious layman, if I search for the obvious [[canon law degree]] (which didn't exist until I created it just now), I (might) end up at [[Doctor of Canon Law]] - which never mentions Latin except to translate the title! In fact, even after pondering and searching a fair bit, I honestly have to say I am not sure enough that a claim of canon law degree and la-1 babel box is contradictory enough for me to enquire further (which definitely does not AGF, as it at least implicitly is calling what was a very respected user a liar). To give an analogy, if I saw a user page of someone which claimed to be a Doctor of computer science with a specialty in functional programming, and it said that the person wasn't an expert in assembly or Haskell or the ML family or a Lisp, I would not be suspicious - looking up their Wikipedia entries, they are all fairly hard and rarefied languages compared to more popular languages like C or Java; but if I saw that they were unfamiliar with types, or functions, or objects, then I could be sure they were claiming unwarranted expertise. The latter would be more suspicious to me than the former - although in point of fact, being the knowledgeable person I am, I would know that it is very very unlikely these days for someone to achieve a PhD while specializing in functional programming *and* not know one of the cited languages, and I could be appropriately suspicious. I believe the warning signs were Essjay were more of the former sort, ones that enough data was there for experts and very interested laypersons to figure it out if they thought about it, but just not enough for the rest of us unless we already know. -- Gwern Inquiring minds want to know.