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*
**
**
Jimmy, say it ain't so.