[WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

[Stephen Park]

On 3/5/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/5/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > William Pietri wrote:
> >
> > > > This especially concerns me as you used your administrative powers to
> > > > enforce your minority view in a disagreement in which you were very
> > > > actively involved. Wouldn't it have been better to let somebody who had
> > > > less involvement decide the outcome?
> >
> William, I understand that feelings are running high and people feel
> they need an outlet. Still, we have a very serious situation here
> where the subject has left Wikipedia and yet is continuing to be
> attacked. Bear in mind that he's being discussed by what we believe to
> be his real name, so BLP kicks in here, and we have to be careful what
> we say, and respectful of his right to get on with his life. It's
> important to discuss the political fall-out so we can work out what
> the lessons are, but comments about the person aren't necessary. As
> David said, it was an uncertified RfC, and he was within his rights to
> delete it.
>
> Sarah
>

Let's ban the New York Times as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.html?ref=business

March 5, 2007
A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side
By NOAM COHEN

In a blink, the wisdom of the crowd became the fury of the crowd. In
the last few days, contributors to Wikipedia, the popular online
encyclopedia, have turned against one of their own who was found to
have created an elaborate false identity.

Under the name Essjay, the contributor edited thousands of Wikipedia
articles and was once one of the few people with the authority to deal
with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors.

To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at
a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his
user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan,
who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside
Louisville.

Mr. Jordan contended that he resorted to a fictional persona to
protect himself from bad actors who might be angered by his
administrative role at Wikipedia. (He did not respond to an e-mail
message, nor to messages conveyed by the Wikipedia office.)

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative
efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good
faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But
it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process — all
editing of entries is marked and saved — allows readers to react to
suspected fraud.

Mr. Jordan's deception came to public attention last Monday when The
New Yorker published a rare editors' note saying that when it wrote
about Essjay as part of a lengthy profile of Wikipedia, "neither we
nor Wikipedia knew Essjay's real name," and that it took Essjay's
credentials and life experience at face value.

In addition to his professional credentials and work on articles
concerning Roman Catholicism, Essjay was described in the magazine's
article, perhaps oddly for a religious scholar, as twice removing a
sentence from the entry on the singer Justin Timberlake, which "Essjay
knew to be false."

After the article appeared, a reader contacted The New Yorker about
Essjay's real identity, which Mr. Jordan had disclosed with little
fanfare when he recently accepted a job at Wikia, a for-profit
company.

In an e-mail message on Friday, The New Yorker's deputy editor, Pamela
Maffei McCarthy, said: "We were comfortable with the material we got
from Essjay because of Wikipedia's confirmation of his work and their
endorsement of him. In retrospect, we should have let our readers know
that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay's identity beyond what
he told us."

The New Yorker editors' note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy
Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the site's
growth. "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem
with it," he said of Mr. Jordan's alter ego.

On Thursday, Mr. Wales, who is traveling in Asia with intermittent
Internet connections, stuck by that view. In a statement relayed
through Wikipedia's public relations officer, he said that at that
time, "Essjay apologized to me and to the community at large for any
harm he may have caused, but he was acting in order to protect
himself.

"I accepted his apology," he continued, "because he is now, and has
always been, an excellent editor with an exemplary track record."

But the broad group of Wikipedia users was not so supportive. Mounting
anger was expressed in public forums like the user pages of Mr. Wales
and Essjay. Initially, a few people wrote to express support for
Essjay, along the lines of WJBscribe, who left a message saying: "Just
wanted to express my 100 percent support for everything you do around
here. I think you were totally entitled to protect your identity.
Don't let all the fuss get you down!"

By Saturday, the prevailing view was summarized in subject lines like
Essjay Must Resign, and notes calling Mr. Jordan's actions "plain and
simple fraud."

Some Wikipedia users argued that Essjay had compounded the deception
by flaunting a fictional Ph.D. and professorship to influence the
editing on the site.

"People have gone through his edits and found places where he was
basically cashing in on his fake credentials to bolster his
arguments," said Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who is also
the founder of The Wikipedia Signpost, the community newspaper for
which he is covering the story. "Those will get looked at again."

In a discussion over the editing of the article with regard to the
term "imprimatur," as used in Catholicism, Essjay defended his use of
the book "Catholicism for Dummies," saying, "This is a text I often
require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it's
credibility."

Over time, Wikipedia users said, Essjay did less editing and writing
and spent more time ensuring that the encyclopedia was as free of
vandalism and drawn-out editing fights as possible.

By Saturday, Mr. Wales changed his mind about the episode. He cleared
off the "talk" section of his own Wikipedia user page — usually
cluttered with personal requests, policy debates and compliments — so
that "this statement gets adequate attention" and announced that he
had "asked Essjay to resign his positions of trust within the
community." He said "that my past support of Essjay in this matter was
fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on."

Complicating matters for Mr. Wales was that Essjay had been hired as a
community manager by Wikia, which Mr. Wales helped to found in 2004.
Mr. Jordan no longer works for Wikia, the company said.

Mr. Snow said the Essjay case "is about the community, the trust the
community depends on in terms of being able to review the work we each
do."

"Even though you don't necessarily know these people personally," he
added, "you see the work enough times and get to know that work."

Mr. Jordan announced his resignation from Wikipedia on his Essjay user
page on Saturday night. In a brief note below, he said simply, "It's
time to make a clean break."

That page had been a model of industry, with tallies of the more than
20,000 articles he edited and statements of personal philosophy and
Wikipedia policy. Where there had been the motto in Latin, "Tu ne cede
malis sed contra audentior ito" ("Yield not to misfortunes, but
advance all the more boldly against them," according to some
translations), there is a stark rectangular black box with the word
"retired" written in white capital letters.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


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