A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side

[Dave Monroe]

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

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.html


 
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