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Academic Credentials and Wikiality
An anonymous reader writes "A prominent Wikipedia administrator and Wikia employee has been caught lying to the media and 'other' professors about his academic credentials. Wikipedia's Essjay has been representing himself as 'a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States; I teach both undergraduate and graduate theology. My Academic Degrees: Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies (B.A.), Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.), Doctorate of Philosophy in Theology (Ph.D.), Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD).' His real identity came to light after Wikia offered him a job: It turns out that he is really 24 years old with no degree living in Louisville, KY. Wikipedia's co-founder, Jimbo Wales, says 'I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.' How will this affect Wikipedia's already shaky reputation with the academic world?"
Wait, Wikipedia had a reputation as a believable source at one time?
If he had been working at Encyclopedia Brittanica as an editor, sure, worry about his work. But at wikipedia is rather duplicitous to criticize it for *both* it's egalitarian editing policy and the character flaws of its administrators. The former mitigates the latter.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
That's the only part that really concerns me. If any editor, let alone an administrator, is using fake credentials to try to bolster support for his arguments, that should be a serious concern. This seems to be the essence of the rule against sockpuppetry, though that particular rule probably doesn't handle a case where the user has only one account.
Now that this is out in the open, I think this person should be deadminned and asked to re-apply for adminship without lying.
I too think that what you do, not what paper you hold, defines you, and your abilities, but to lie about holding said paper is inexcusable. It then brings into question your credibility over all. Prove yourself on your own merit, not on falsehoods.
I am, therefore you think.
The actual danger he poses to the site is quite small--and that's the beauty of Wikiedia. It will survive vandals, biased authors & liars (like Essjay) but will prevail in the end at being the starting point of potentially unreliable information that will set you on your path to finding what you desire to know. Mr. Wales knows all of this and that's why he's indifferent about Essjay's lies. The thing that worries me is that Essjay might have been editing an article on theocracy and then when it was challenged in the discussion, he could refer other editors to his credentials. And even if he wasn't doing that, users could be considering everything he says being golden because of his claimed credentials.
I would never, for a minute, consider this a threat to Wikipedia's reputation, however.
I don't care about pseudonyms, nor what bits of paper you do or don't hold. I will continue to give someone who has a doctorate in medicine, more credence than a co-worker, at least when it come to 'what to do about my back pain'.
I do however, object to someone lying about having the aforementioned bits of paper.
Going off at a tangent, but when has an encyclopedia ever been a good source to cite in an academic work? I've never come across someone citing Brittanica or Encarta beyond high-school level. Encyclopedias are up there with pop science books and newspaper columns when it comes to respectability as an academic source. At least Wikipedia has the advantage of giving you references which you can cite, in most cases.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
So.... it's ok to tell the world that they should belive you as an 'expert' based upon your credentials, even if you have none?
You, sir, live in a strange world that I want no part of. This man has proven himself to be a charletan and a liar, and until he's proven to change assigning him any level of credibility is rather idiotic.
Worse, offering him a job based on that work history makes Wika look rather silly.
Well, I'll tell you what: any day of the week, if I was in a serious car accident, I'd take a surgeon with a piece of paper from an arbitrary designed academic obstacle course than an unemployed, uneducated individual with mere natural curiosity as his only credentials.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I can see why he did it, I think you can't blame him entirely. We have a whole irrational damn-near religious awe of credentials and enormous stigma against those who do not possess this "sacred currency"
I don't. But I do have this irrational attachment to the truth.
Thing is, I still go to wikipedia to look up info, it's become a reflex, just typing a noun appended by "wikipedia" in google. But I no longer feel good about it. Nor am I particularly inclined to help edit it when I can see that my efforts would simply be sabotaged from above by malignant indifference, blundering incompetence, and (increasingly now) outright mendacity.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
"I would never, for a minute, consider this a threat to Wikipedia's reputation, however."
I disagree. Much is made of the idea of Wikipedia as a *community*, and that the strength of that community compensates for other structural vulnerabilities. The general response when someone posits mischief on Wikipedia is: "the community will catch it." So far, so good.
However, a community is composed of individuals, and the strength of that community is directly proportional to the strength of those individuals. An academic community's strength is relies on the individual credentials of it's members. Same with an athletic community (sports team), or a business community.
But the Wikipedia community members, being effectively anonymous, have no characteristics by which to be judged. Their strengths are judged solely on a subjective basis: do people trust and respect them? So far, the Wikipedia community has been doing OK in that regard, and is generally trusted and respected by the public at large.
But here comes a guy who had built up a high level of trust and respect who turns out to be highly untrustworthy. Let's face it - the guy invented a grand CV out of whole cloth. He lied, which is the antithesis to trustworthiness. So now here is a memmber of the wikipedia community who cannot be trusted, and has lost all respect. This diminishes the community, not only by the incremental loss, but by the questions it raises: who else is faking their credentials? Who else can't be trusted?
The damage from this one guy may be trivial, but it isn't inconsequential. If you pluck a hair from your head, you aren't bald all of a sudden. But if you keep doing it, you will definitely become bald, and it will be way before the last hair is plucked. It's all a matter of perception.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You're right, up to the point of his lying about his credentials.
If he had just said from the beginning "I'm 24 with no degree, but I think the quality of my work addresses my fitness for the job", then there would be no problem.
But he lied about it. And if he's willing to lie about that, what else is he willing to lie about?
If you can't trust the people, then you can't trust the information they're presenting either. Fire his ass.
I can't help but scratch my head when people talk about Wikipedia having a shaky reputation. Look at the About Wikipedia page. Nowhere do they claim to be reliable or authoritative source of information. They fully disclose the fact that they're an encyclopedia "project" that anyone can edit. Everyone knows it. And that's what they are. I always thought you have to be found making false claims in order to gain a bad reputation. But I don't see any false claims here.
As for the content, of course the quality of it is questionable. You know what website you're looking at. What do you expect? It doesn't mean Wikipedia failed. They are what they say they are. Of course they'll never reach the refined, well-edited state of a traditional encyclopedia. But nobody is demanding you to pay $1500 for a gold-trimmed set of Wikipedia volumes sitting on your shelf either.
Maybe people criticize Wikipedia because they use the "encyclopedia" moniker. But this is just semantics. Wikipedia has expanded the meaning of what an "encyclopedia" can be. But if you're narrow-minded and you think "encyclopedia" must mean "something that is always right", of course you'll end up complaining.
Is nobody else actually impressed by the quality of the entries they visit? When Wikipedia started, I expected pure crap. I still expect most of it to be crap. So it's a pleasant surprise to find to find good stuff, and there's a lot of really good stuff. (The entries on discrete cosine transformation, network protocols, and a lot of religions come to mind.) For many subjects, there was no source of information on the web with an equivalent level of quality before Wikipedia. People should appreciate that and stop whining. You're on the damn Internet, you should expect garbage everywhere.
As for the guy faking a bunch of degrees, I'm not surprised. At least he didn't fake his way into a job. He faked his way onto a free encyclopedia project. Like that's a big revelation: There's a weirdo on the Internet. You can only wonder why he went to all the trouble. Anyway, it doesn't change Wikipedia's reputation at all in my eyes. The site is still exactly the site it claims to be.
Too true. Using Wikipedia for research is always a smart move. Citing it for research clearly indicates you were too lazy to follow up.
So it's okay to lie about your academic credentials? If you're that good, you will get recognition with or without the paper. If you're not, you can get some recognition for having put forth the effort to get the paper.
But getting the recognition for lying about the paper? That's crap. You've got neither the skill to get by without it, the dedication to get it, or the integrity to tell the truth about it.
No respect from me.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Essjay brags about how he fooled The New Yorker:
;)
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/essjay.html
I wouldn't exactly call it "bragging", especially in light of the other sections on that page wherein he explains quite thoroughly the wikistalker element that no one has yet mentioned. I've been active on WP for 2.5 years now, and I remember Essjay from way back. I wouldn't say we've ever had much interaction, but I remember the username, and while I'm nowhere near as active as he is, I don't recall him ever using his fake credentials as an argument in support of a decision of any kind. The credentials appear to have been used entirely as a cover for real life so that the crazy stalker portion of society (which seems to be more prominent online; go figure!) wouldn't be able to track him down.
Do I agree with hiding your identity in the way that he did? Not really -- why not just claim you're a 24-year-old living in your parents' basement in Nevada? It's no less believable than saying the same about Kentucky.
Do I have a problem with what he did? Not really.
Slashdot is, as usual, blowing this WAY out of proportion. The only thing that's even remotely "wrong" about this is that he claimed academic credentials he didn't have. If nothing else, it shows a lack of respect for the effort required to gain a PhD, but that's hardly worthy of a story on Slashdot (or any other news site).
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061127-8296 .html
Experts rate Wikipedia's accuracy higher than non-experts
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I'm going to pass on your second example, because as far as I know, most armies don't have a limit to numbers of recruits.
However, do you think your first man should get a job over someone else who has done the work to earn a magic "bit of paper"? If you assume that at the point of employment, two people have the same potential for future achievement, would you take someone with a great bit of paper over someone with an average bit of paper? (Yes, there are always other factors, but often they cancel each other out) Would you still take the same great bit of paper over the average bit of paper if the great bit of paper didn't actually exist?
Fake credentials are one kind of problem. Here's another. Check out the following articles on Taiwan and the Republic of China. In fact, check out any of the Taiwan related articles. Taiwan is a vibrant democracy with a long stable government and a strong economy. It has a military and maintains its own borders. But in the world of Wikipedia, Taiwan is just an island territory of a government in exile. The problem? There are tons of ultra-nationalistic ideological Chinese and more and more of them know enough English to edit Wikipedia. The crowd has one point of view and in Wikipedia, the crowd always wins.
Lying about credentials on resumes is actually fairly common and some of those liars are the best performers ever hired. But you can bet that regardless of skill or merit they wouldn't be hired if they hadn't claimed to have the paper.
In my case you'd lose that bet, although I probably wouldn't quite represent myself as one of "the best performers ever hired". I've been a professional software developer for about 20 years now and have never had difficulty finding a job, even though my formal education extends only as far as the high school diploma that's packed away somewhere. Lest you think that all I've done is little bitty one-offs for individual clients all those years, I'll say that if you own an American car newer than about 7-8 years old, odds are that every time you get in you see the results of my code. The FCC uses my code to verify RF coverage and interference data for potential licensees. Checked yourself in at the airport using a self-serve kiosk? Some of my code was quite possibly in that system as well. What's more, in all those 20 years I've never had a need to lie about my credentials yet somehow I've managed to stay employed. Maybe it's magic, but I suspect it has more to do with me being competent at what I do, having a fairly good idea of what HR people are looking for, and knowing how to interview well.
You're arguing that the ends justify the means, and I flatly disagree. Lying about credentials may get someone's foot in the door, but I'd have no hesitation about bouncing their ass right back out when I found out about it. They've demonstrated that honesty doesn't have a place in their value system, and that their own well-being is more important to them than integrity. That's the kind of value system that lets corporate espionage, embezzlement, insider trading, and all kinds of other fun stuff flourish.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas