Wikipedia’s fraudulent editor: What about the content?
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The New York Times has an interesting article about Wikipedia, one that recaps an apparently rather large brouhaha (in the Wikipedia community, at least) about a big-time Wikipedia contributor and editor and the false identity he put forth to the community. Summary of the debate, at least as much as it matters for this here discussion:
This Ryan Jordan guy was within his rights to protect his identity. Who cares about the name under which he contributed to the site?
vs.
Who the hell does this guy think he is, anyway? He lied about who he was in a community based on trust and contributing to the greater good.
The Times article also discusses a New Yorker article about Ryan Jordan — or Essjay, as he’s known to Wikipedians — and while that whole bit of editorial “whoops, sorry” is interesting, I think the Times made a huge, glaring, ugly, smelly omission: What about the content?
The story of this misrepresented identity is interesting, but there’s zero discussion of the accuracy of this guy’s contributions to the site. The Times says:
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.”
But we get no look into whether this or any other assertions made by Jordan were accurate. Regardless of how they were defended, isn’t anyone curious about the substance? Even the discussion page associated with Essjay’s Wikipedia entry has no detailed discussion about the material involved in this mess (that is, the discussion page yields on evidence of this discussion after a quick scan of the page — it’s a little too “inside baseball” to be read at length).
Even if this fact check has been done and is published somewhere — and I hope…I believe it is — why didn’t the New York Times (”All the news that’s fit to print” or some bullshit like that) tell me about it? I feel cheated, as if this newspaper article were misrepresenting itself, purporting to be “insightful” and perhaps even “investigatory,” when in reality, it’s little more than the journalistic equivalent of a 24-year-old from Kentucky lying about having a Ph.D.
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There’s actually quite a few Wikipedians scrutinizing Essjay’s edits. See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Checking_Essjay.27s_edits - However, Essjay still enjoys a great deal of support from a large number of Wikipedians with administrator privileges, and they are doing their level best to censor any and all criticism of Essjay on the Wikipedia website. Said apologists are characterizing the efforts to check Essjay’s edits as “vindictive.”
Interesting. That post you linked to, Mr. Esquire, was being written at nearly exactly the same time I was writing my post here. I never had any doubt that someone, somewhere was checking up on the validity of Essjay’s posts. I just can’t believe the New York Times didn’t even address the issue.