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?"

Comments

Wow...

[Zeek40]

Lying about having a Liberal Arts degree.... that's a new level of desperation. ;)

I see no problem..

[Anonymous Coward]

I see no problem with this current situation.

Dr. Anonymous Coward
Harvard Law

Wait, what?

[maniac/dev/null]

Wait, Wikipedia had a reputation as a believable source at one time?

Re:Wait, what?

[elrous0]

Don't knock it. I learn valuable stuff there all the time. For example, did you know that the population of African elephants has TRIPLED in just the last ten years?

-Eric

Re:Wait, what?

[Nasarius]

You managed to get to college (I assume) without realizing that no encyclopedia should be cited in a paper? They even tell you this themselves. You wouldn't cite a textbook either; they're tertiary sources, and mostly useless for getting a deep, accurate view of any topic. They're starting points for research that will give you a broad overview and sometimes a few sources to follow up on. For many topics, Wikipedia is quite appropriate for this role.

Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[physicsphairy]

The major premise of wikipedia functionality is that it can be edited by anyone, yes? This is probably also its number one criticism, but taking that into account, how does it matter if someone high-up in the organization has background issues? Unless he is maliciously mucking up the software itself, he hardly has any more potential for corrupting the content than I do or some random schmuck browsing wiki at a library.

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.

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[mdd4696]

Not only can anyone edit Wikipedia, anyone can become an administrator as well. Anyone who makes valuable contributions to Wikipedia and shows an understanding of policies and Wikipedia's five pillars is welcome to apply to be an administrator.

"Administrator" is somewhat of a misnomer, and many people give the position far more credence than it warrants. The fact that Essjay did not tell the truth about his personal life doesn't really influence Wikipedia's credibility at all; it's the misperception that this somehow influenced his ability to be an upstanding Wikipedian.

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[ZachPruckowski]

I think the problem here is that if a prominent member of the Wikipedia community can lie about something like that, then there's not much stock placed in truth in the organization. I'm not asking for real names or anything, but claiming to have a PhD when you don't ought to be a no-no in any community.

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[anthony_dipierro]

The major premise of wikipedia functionality is that it can be edited by anyone, yes?

Well, not exactly anyone. It is possible to get banned from Wikipedia. If this person has been using those fake credentials to gain support from others while editing articles, then maybe a ban is appropriate. De-adminship is also certainly appropriate if those credentials were presented before the community approved of his adminship.

Unless he is maliciously mucking up the software itself, he hardly has any more potential for corrupting the content than I do or some random schmuck browsing wiki at a library.

Actually, admins have quite a bit of potential to corrupt Wikipedia content, especially if they can gain the support of other admins by presenting them with false credentials. Users can be blocked and pages can be protected from editing except by admins.

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.

But Wikipedia doesn't really have a totally egalitarian editing policy. When the content of a page is disputed by an admin and a non-admin, the admin is going to win the dispute 9 times out of 10. That might not be explicit policy, but it is the de facto reality of the situation. Admins tend to support other admins. Even moreso if the admin claims to have certain credentials.

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[kripkenstein]

Furthermore, the fake credentials were used specifically for the purpose of bolstering Wikipedia's integrity. Therefore when they turned out to be fake, they slight Wikipedia's credibility all the more.

This is terrible publicity, and I am surprised that Wales isn't pissed off. I know I am ashamed for Wikipedia, which I hold in very high regard. This guy makes it look like Wikipedia 'community leaders' are a bunch of amateurs that have no qualms about lying or deceiving.

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[JanneM]

The problem is that jimmy Wales has been going around touting wikipedia as a competitor to Britannica and other, more serious, encyclopedias. This just points out a major chink in wikipedia's armour: that it's largely predicated on unverified trust.

There is no problem with the standing of Wikipedia in the academic community. Nobody would find citing Wikipedia in a serious paper acceptable; this doesn't change it. The fallacy is is in the implicit assumption that something like Britannica would be.

Wikipedia, like Britannica, is great for quickly getting the basics on just about any subject (and Wikipedia more so than a standard encyclopedia due to its breadth). And neither Wikipedia nor Britannica has the depth or standing to be a first-class source to cite for a scholarly work. Neither is written to have such standing - and a good thing too; having every entry read like a journal paper would make them unusable for their real use of quick orientation to a subject.

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[just_another_sean]

Not to mention he was citing his credentials as a reason for his edits to be taken more seriously. It's not that he's just some guy editing a page and inflating his own importance at the same time by talking sh1t about his background; he's asking people to give his edits more credence based on his "background".

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[GodInHell]

but claiming to have a PhD when you don't ought to be a no-no in any community. Actually.. it represents a deep betrayal of one of the core concepts of both that forum, and this. When we discuss issues on Wikipedia or Slashdot, we often refer to our careers, our degrees, our experiences as cause for consideration of our claims which otherwise lack authority.

For example: I have a degree in philosophy, 5 years experience as a software engineer, and I'm working on my law degree. When I speak on these issues I know when to make authorative statements (BSD is not a flavor of windows) and when not to (is BSD a flavor of Linux? I never really looked at BSD.. so I have no idea.) If I claim to know about particle physics (and I may) my knowledge will be admittedly amatuer, I don't follow that field as closely as I do supreme court rulings... I have no authority in that field.

Our community rests on trust - trust that the people who say they are X are in fact X. This trust breaks down often here on /. it's a bad thing to exacerbate this by allowing a member of the wikipedia community to garner approval by employing false authority. We don't NEED authority to speak intelligently, but we should not claim that authority when we don't have it. Professors often learn from their students, and there is plenty of room in the on-line community for intelligent and committed amatuers to make major contributions to the knowledge base. We don't need to confuse the act of lieing with the act of participation... otherwise any claim to authority will need to be dismissed out of hand - and that would harm our communites more than help them.

Or at least that's my take on it.

-GiH

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[imidan]

I get the feeling that there's this grand, egalitarian philosophy behind Wikipedia--this ideal of a vast, distributed network of citizen editors who form a self-improving, self-policing community. The reality is different. The real purpose of the community is not clear to me.

You'll note that when you open up the Britannica, you don't find people's names attached to the articles there. Wikipedia, on the other hand, almost has ego built right in to the system. Look at Essjay's user page. There's an entire section dedicated to bragging about his edit count, his longevity with the project, his position in the top 1000, etc. Tell me, is Wikipedia about producing a great research product, or is it about who has the most marbles?

Why was this article posted? Because one user, ostensibly to "protect" himself from the Internet "in these trying times," misrepresented himself with a litany of credentials that he had no right to claim. Why? I find the "protection" excuse to be woefully inadequate. He could have protected himself simply by maintaining anonymity. But who wants to show up at the game with the same sized sack of marbles as any other poor schlub? Why not show up with ten times as many marbles, if you can? That's effectively what he did with his phony Ph.D and his teaching position on a mystery faculty somewhere.

I think that's what Wikipedia has become, to some people. It's a massively distributed Internet popularity contest, just like any other message board. In large part, they manage to come out with good articles, but for a lot of the people there, that's only part of the reason for contributing. The other part, and possibly the larger part, is composed of bragging rights, power over content and over other users, and other perks of being important in the hierarchy. This is the opposite of egalitarian. People joke on Wikipedia about a "cabal" of users that control the content. That word may be leaning toward the hysterical, but is it so far from the truth? How many editors believe that they exert some power of ownership over particular articles? Have you ever tried to make the slightest edit to an article where Wikipedia's big boys are playing? Good luck with that.

I may sound more negative than I really feel. I like Wikipedia, and I find it valuable, and I make edits there when I feel that they are appropriate. But I have no illusions as to the attitudes of many of the other users and the capricious ways in which they wield their power.

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[GodInHell]

You'll note that when you open up the Britannica, you don't find people's names attached to the articles there. Wikipedia, on the other hand, almost has ego built right in to the system. Look at Essjay's user page. There's an entire section dedicated to bragging about his edit count, his longevity with the project, his position in the top 1000, etc. Tell me, is Wikipedia about producing a great research product, or is it about who has the most marbles? Actually, that's not true. Britannica used to brag about the qualitiy of its authors (Einstein wrote the sections on relativity for instance). I actually used to work for Britannica (nobody imporant, I worked in the QA team for Britannica Online, the .com spin-off back in 2001), and that was always one of apocraphal tales of the day-gone-by, back when Sears Roebuck gave Britannica money to run the company as a public good. Britannica was ABSOLUTELY focused on getting the best authors to write thier articles, and that's why they (used to be?) the best.

It's a long way from a scottsman in the low-lands penning down the history of the world's knowledge as he knew it. I actually got to take a look at those old originals though (closed covers, in plastic, on a shelf) - Britannica has retained copies of almost every edition. They used to be kept in the old tape-vault right next to the mainframe room, back before they rolled all of that back out, gave up the whole printing of new editions thing, and went on-line only (then turned around and went back.. they've very confused.) I think they moved them up to the library a few years back.. and then the company moved, so who knows now.

But anyway, yes - Britannica articles do have by-lines if the writer is an impressive name.

-GiH

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[Dread_ed]

"Our community rests on trust - trust that the people who say they are X are in fact X."

I beg to differ with you on this point, let me explain. Our community rests on the fact that it is a public community that anyone can contribute to, much like Wikipedia. Because of the constituents it is self balancing. For instance, if you say you are a professor of X and make a dumbassed/incorrect comment (whether in your area of expertise or not) there are a bunch of people here who will call you out with superior facts, figures, and examples. In addition, it doesn't matter if you or they are actual professors or not, it just matters who is right.

For me, the greatest strength in a community like this is the spirit of competetive geekiness and intellectual one-upmanship that led many of us to pursue careers in professions that most normal people will never begin to understand. That is the basis of a community like this one: a deep and abiding desire to know the whys and hows and to percieve how they interact correctly. Oh and to flame to cindery ashes anyone who dares to contradict the truth.

Seriously, knowing what you should know about anonymous communications, why would you ever take anyone's self professed knowledge and experience at face value? If anything, when I hear someone spout off their credentials in this forum it carnks up the sensitivity on my BS detector. In anonymous communications, never, ever consider the source. Consider the merits of the dialogue.

That aside, I do not agree with lying to people to give yourself a leg up. Far from it. I just disagree with your position that the community of an anonymous online forum is based on trust.

Then again I am scared to wear tinfoil hats because I think it is a government conspiracy. I am a cynical and suspicious bastard so it could just be me.

Re:Wiki equality applies to the higher ups too

[GodInHell]

Seriously, knowing what you should know about anonymous communications, why would you ever take anyone's self professed knowledge and experience at face value? If anything, when I hear someone spout off their credentials in this forum it carnks up the sensitivity on my BS detector. In anonymous communications, never, ever consider the source. Consider the merits of the dialogue. Okay.. but people DO rely on a poster's claim to authority. It's one of the ways you hash out the frivalous argument from the meat of the issue. Here on /. especially, there is a low threshold of argument viability - facts and statistics are rare, hyperbole and noise are high. That's not even considering the technical issues.

For example, if I say that it is reasonably safe to assume the RIAA's case agains Tenise Baker will survive her Rule 12 (b)6 motion to dismiss because judges tend to err on the side of allowing a trial to go forward when factual questions reasonably might exist rather than risk being overturned on appeal - the authority of that statement is difficult to track. I can cite the law (which does not state that), I can point to a few cases where the issues were similar with a likewise result.. but many things in the legal world are simply not recorded. Like the rule that a police officer probably won't pull you over unless you exceed 10 miles over the speed limit - it's true, but authority is lacking except for experience and a few folks involved in the writing of tickets who can explaint that most speed tracking machines are calibrated to a 10mph +/- accuracy, and therefore tickets for less than 10 over the limit aren't strong. Except for the departments that use other than radar decices with much higher degrees of precision... but I digress.

If two /.ers started flinging numbers back and forth aruging about more technical issues in physics (or even history) the degree of work involved in checking their numbers to see who is "more right" (assuming either one is) is prohibitive - the easier, and essentially sole, solution is to look at the speakers, and make a judgement call on trustworthiness.. which is more likely to be speaking out of his ass, fudging numbers, or inventing anecdotes.. that's the one I put in the ignore column.

Even in /. the range of debate is far too wide for any of us to be expert or even proficient, in all the issues - wikipedia only exacerbates this - as a result, we must depend upon trust and authority. We're really left without alternatives.. IMHO. The community has picked up on this too.. honest and reasonable people often put an "I am not" statement to clarify that what they are about to say is the truth as they know it, but they are not experts. Then the experts do speak up - the proclaimed experts anyway.. I believe that most of those who claim to be, probably are expert. But then, I also make enemies out of those who do get exposed as liars.

-GiH

A pseudonym?

[Bieeanda]

No. Sorry, but no. This is nothing more or less than a profound appeal to improper authority, the authority being the editor in question. I'd like to know how many times his 'credentials' have been called upon as proof in Wiki arguments, or the number of times that people have agreed with him on the false assumption that he was playing things straight.

His username is a pseudonym. His claimed credentials are a fraud.

Re:A pseudonym?

[Sobrique]

We do culturally pay more attention to 'academia'. That is, after all, kind of the point - someone who's life work is a particular field, has a quite good basis to assert expertise.

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.

Re:A pseudonym?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

This is nothing more or less than a profound appeal to improper authority, the authority being the editor in question.

This reflects one of the greatest flaws in the US educational system. I went to public schools. I took probably 8 or more history classes, none of which ever made it to WWII and half of which spent a lot of my childhood woefully mis-educated me about the facts behind "thanksgiving." In none of my classes in public school was I taught critical thinking, logic, or the rhetorical method... vital tools for properly understanding, making decisions, and communicating effectively. We barely touched upon the scientific method, despite having numerous general science classes. Even in order to get my undergraduate degree I was never required to take a course in the rhetorical method.

If education in the US provided proper building blocks and intellectual tools, instead of rote memorization of both true and false "factoids" the situation where one person fakes their credentials would be of no matter. Appealing to authority is a logical fallacy as any properly educated person knows. The sad fact is, most people are so poorly educated that even politicians have no problem not only espousing obvious logical fallacies, but calling them by name (slippery slope is a fallacy and calling something a slippery slope does not bolster your argument, it undermines it, when taking to people who understand the rules of logic). This is not a failing of this person or wikipedia so much as a general failing of the wikipedia user base.

Re:A pseudonym?

[Txiasaeia]

You are deemed more or less worthy by how well you navigated some arbitrary designed academic obstacle course that may or most likely - may not have interested you because of the stale (or incorrect) way it was presented and the stifling of natural curiosity that happens in how children are taught today.

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.

Re:A pseudonym?

[nuzak]

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.

Re:A pseudonym?

[yankpop]

So what's your point then? Because PhDs are hard to get, and once achieved they confer social status beyond what you think they actually merit, it becomes ok to fraudulently claim you have one?

What you say about religious awe and stigma may be true in many cases. That doesn't justify further subverting the whole system by accepting fraud as an appropriate response.

I have seen from the inside the problems with the process of acquiring a PhD, and the misuse of same by people who've suffered through it. That said, when I complete my PhD in evolutionary biology in a few months my opinions on the subjects of ecology and evolution damn well better carry more weight than that of the average chump.

yp.

Well..

[Rob T Firefly]

Speaking as a top award-winning particle physicist, race car driver, neurosurgeon, and rock star, I feel that this is absolutely terrible.

Its an Encyclopedia...

[jspayne]

Its an Encyclopedia - an Encyclopedia does not have any standing in the academic community in the first place (beyond 6th grade, anyway). No one, ever, should consider Wikipedia to be an authoritative source - it isn't intended to be one. It is just a repository of common knowledge.

Re:Its an Encyclopedia...

[Sockatume]

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.

He should be deadminned

[anthony_dipierro]

Wikipedia's co-founder, Jimbo Wales, says 'I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.'

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.

Re:He should be deadminned

[Dachannien]

Since there is supposed to be no original research on Wikipedia and articles are only supposed to include facts cited from verifiable primary sources, it doesn't matter whether the editors of Wikipedia are Nobel-prize-winning physicists, illegal aliens, or baby killers. The person's arguments don't enter into it, because those arguments aren't filtered through the person's credentials, but through Wikipedia policy.

If you see a situation where this isn't true, be bold and make an effort to correct the problem.

Now, if this guy is using his fake credentials to get a job, money, media attention, or whatever else, then there's a problem, but I agree with Jimbo in the context of Wikipedia on this one - as long as his adminship was based on his activity on Wikipedia and his efforts to uphold Wikipedia's policies, Wikipedia should be blind to his real-world foibles.

Re:He should be deadminned

[anthony_dipierro]

Since there is supposed to be no original research on Wikipedia and articles are only supposed to include facts cited from verifiable primary sources, it doesn't matter whether the editors of Wikipedia are Nobel-prize-winning physicists, illegal aliens, or baby killers.

Nope, you forgot to carry that word "supposed" all the way through. Maybe it is supposed to not matter whether the editors of Wikipedia, but when the admins are the ones these rules in the first place, it does matter who the admins are.

The person's arguments don't enter into it, because those arguments aren't filtered through the person's credentials, but through Wikipedia policy.

This might be true if a computer were implementing Wikipedia "policy", but Wikipedia "policy" is implemented by humans. These policies (which are really very sparse, most of them are non-binding "guidelines") are not enforced systematically and consistently, so of course a person's credentials come into play.

Anyway, if a person's credentials don't matter, then why not let everyone be an admin? If a person's credentials don't matter, then surely this particular admin will have no problem being re-granted adminship after a new review.

If you see a situation where this isn't true, be bold and make an effort to correct the problem.

I've tried that many times in the past. It doesn't work.

Now, if this guy is using his fake credentials to get a job, money, media attention, or whatever else, then there's a problem, but I agree with Jimbo in the context of Wikipedia on this one - as long as his adminship was based on his activity on Wikipedia and his efforts to uphold Wikipedia's policies, Wikipedia should be blind to his real-world foibles.

Personally I think the dichotomy between Wikipedia and the real world is a false one. Wikipedia is not a MMORPG. It's a real effort to make a real encyclopedia for the real world.

Re:Leave him alone!

[BadERA]

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.

Re:Leave him alone!

[Anonymous Coward]

For me this is just more proof that it doesn't matter what degrees you have under your belt, it's what you DO that matters. This guy is obviously intelligent and motivated. He has helped to produce one of the best information sites in the world. If he wants to have an alter web identity, more power to him. Just leave him alone.

That's a good point but I don't agree with leaving him alone. I mean, the point of Wikipedia is to get unbiased truth and knowledge out to the world. If you're lying about your education on the very site that you intend to spread knowledge & truth with, what good are you for it?

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.

edu.wikipedia.org

[LoudMusic]

They could host a second wikipedia site, edu.wikipedia.org or some such, using all the same software started with an empty database. In order to get an editors account you'd have to provide credentials from an upstanding college or university. Then see if it ever gets used.

Re:Credentials are over rated... for some fields..

[Deag]

This teacher training course could be expanded by testing the participants to make sure no bad ones slip through. Then for more complex teaching requirements there could be longer training courses which also is examined to maintain a level of quality. Each of these exams could have a certificate to show to others that the person who took it is competent in this area. Then we wouldn't need those useless credentials.

How is this any different than meatspace?

[HangingChad]

You can pick out almost any organization the size of Wikipedia and I bet I can find at least one person fudging their resume, or completely faking it and probably more than one if your company has more than 50 people. All that kid would have needed was to be a few years older and he could have diploma-milled his credentials. Not much different.

Want to go through the faculty of any small or medium size community college and see how many diploma mill teachers they have on staff? Or how many people took graduate classes but never actually completed that degree they're claiming.

Buying credentials is easy, the good ones will even verify them for employment checks. Sure, sooner or later the diploma mill will be found out, but who goes back to validate credentials periodically? A few companies but not very many.

Re:How is this any different than meatspace?

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to go through the faculty of any small or medium size community college and see how many diploma mill teachers they have on staff?

This is inflamatory at best, blatent trolling at worst. Nobody hates a diploma mill as much as a community college. Think about it for a second and you'd realize that diploma mill schools threaten to destroy community colleges with little effort and offering little benefit to society at large.

It's fair to say that some instructors at a community college don't all have bachelors degrees, but that has more to do with the fact that most CC's also act as part trade school as well as undergrad school. Two of my main instructors for instance had bachelors degrees in different fields and associates degrees in CIS, but taught the core CIS curriculumn. That's not to say that there wasn't anyone with a BS there on the contrary, these two simply had more education/experience at the end of the day than the rest.

On the whole of things I have seen instructors with no BS or BA teaching out there, but the classes weren't ever labeled over 100 (a.k.a. non-transferable) and these classes were usually technical/trade or mainstream with a bias towards a particular field.

Community Colleges see diploma mill schools the same way a job applicant would view someone that lied on their resume. They viciously pursue and expose the worthless liar, because they have the most to lose.

Actual credentials

[ari_j]

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to college.

Re:Actual credentials

[ari_j]

This is in response to you and the sibling. I am aware of who wrote it - the reason I didn't cite the source is because I assumed that everyone on Slashdot would know it right away. You don't cite things like "vast right-wing conspiracy"[1] or "in Soviet Russia"[2] jokes for the same reason.

Then again, kids these days may not know, so I will be more careful about citing obvious sources in the future.

[1] - Hillary Clinton
[2] - Yakov Smirnoff

Re:Actual credentials

[grasshoppa]

Chuck Norris, is that you?

Re:Leave him alone!

[LordPhantom]

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.

Stil Full of Shit?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

His claimed credentials are a fraud.

Not only that, his revised Wiki bio now says he was an account manager for Fortune 20 company and a licensed paralegal for 5 years before that. The guy is 24. Let's assume he was this account manager for maybe a year? So he must have started the 2 year paralegal school at what? 16 or so? Yeah.

Re:Stil Full of Shit?

[elrous0]

I think the only creditial he has earned is "Long-time compulsive liar." I've worked with a few guys like that. They would continue to tell obvious lies even after they were called on it. And, the more you ignored them, the larger the lies would grow.

Every compulsive liar will tell you they're a somebody--desperately masking the fact that they're just another nobody.

-Eric

Re:Stil Full of Shit?

[nomadic]

So he must have started the 2 year paralegal school at what? 16 or so? Yeah.

Depends on the jurisdiction, some places you don't need any sort of degree to be a paralegal.

Not only that, his revised Wiki bio now says he was an account manager for Fortune 20 company

It's possible. "Account manager" isn't an especially prestigious title to start with, and he doesn't say what kind of account he was managing. Home Depot is in the Fortune 20, some minor clerical work at a local Home Depot store could count as an account manager.

So working part-time at a law firm after school for a few years, and then a minor clerical job at Home Depot? I can see that.

Some background on the controversy

[Everyman]

Some screen-shot links for those who want more information. (Wikipedia sometimes makes controversial pages disappear):

Essjay's user page at Wikia, where he "outed" himself:
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/gifs/wmessjay.png

Previous details from an old user page at Wikipedia:
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/gifs/essjay5.png

Essjay brags about how he fooled The New Yorker:
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/essjay.html

Re:Some background on the controversy

[the pickle]

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

Re:Leave him alone!

[Stewie241]

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.

Which is why when you're doing research and moderating such a tool source is so important. There are doctors who write garbage diet books - it doesn't mean they are good. Sources need to be cited. You can't really on a 'mine is bigger than yours' attitude to claim informational integrity. Sources should be peer reviewed articles or studies. Sure, it is fine to present reasoned arguments as to why something is or is not true, but "because I said so" is not an argument.

Re:Leave him alone!

[shaitand]

That would be ideal. Unfortunately in the real world you probably won't have the opportunity to show such merit without claims to a piece of paper.

The Wikipedia Cabal

[br00tus]

If Wikipedia was interested in being a reliable encyclopedia, we would know who the top people are (Arbitration Committee etc.), a lot of them would have PHD's, and there would also be a place up there for techies and so forth.

So when the Arbitration Committee had elections (which Jimbo didn't want), who did he appoint that did not get the most votes? JayJG, who had 98 people oppose him going onto ArbCom, which was a hell of a lot for the position (it was over 100, but they attacked people's votes, cajoled people into changing their votes, erased questions and comments about his misconduct etc.) Filiocht had the same number of votes for him as did JayJG, yet only 18 opposing him. Filiocht is someone almost everyone can agree is fair, a lot of people have problems with JayJG and his biases. A number of people met the vote threshold and got a higher percentage than JayJG, so we thought we finally won and got him off the committee, which he had never been elected to. But Jimbo appointed him again, just like he did the first time.

Why? Because he agrees with him politically. Jimbo ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years and is one of those Randroid nuts. He appoints people like Fred Bauder, a lawyer who was disbarred for telling one of his woman clients to pay him in sex. Larry Sanger is who built Wikipedia anyway, but Jimbo was his boss so he not only wanted to grab the glory, he denies Sanger any credit.

The problems at the top are massive, and I don't think Wikipedia will survive it. I see a split happening, and competitors, and the first real competitor will win and Wikipedia will disappear. I saw Gopher and Archie and Veronica be overtaken by Opentext on the web (anyone remember them?) and then Webcrawler and then Alta Vista and finally Google. Larry Sanger's creation is too good to not get competition. Of course, Jimbo pushed Larry aside and is ruining things. The next Wikipedia competitor will make Wikipedia history, just like Opentext is more or less history nowadays.

I Just Realized Something

[I re-discovered Amer]

There are a bunch of other users on Wikipedia who say that they are professors. But, many of them are hyper-active. No one can edit Wikipedia that much and still have even a job. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angr -- who also has pages on Commons, Wikisource, a dozen other languages, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mel_Etitis is another one. Same for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Future_Perfect_a t_Sunrise. I have nothing against these guys -- they're pretty civil -- but I must say that I have my doubts now!

Re:Leave him alone!

[R2.0]

"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.

Re:Leave him alone!

[JoeD]

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.

He went to the same school as I did.

[hey!]

U of Me.

Re:Leave him alone!

[kalirion]

That would be ideal. Unfortunately in the real world you probably won't have the opportunity to show such merit without claims to a piece of paper.

Yes, he's sure showed his merit to the world now. I think we already have enough misinformation in the media, don't you?

Re: How will this affect Wikipedia?

[Fordiman]

Or not.

Honestly. You don't use Wikipedia directly for academic stuff. You use it as a starting point, but you never reference it. Any college student can tell you this.

'Shaky reputation in the Academic world.' Hah. It's got a great rep - as a starting point.

Re:it wont

[Lazerf4rt]

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.

Theology.

[Tatarize]

Come on now, he said he had a degree in theology. If there is any degree which claiming you have and not having is a rather moot point it is theology. Just accept his degree on faith. It'll be fine.

Re:Theology.

[irenaeous]

Part of what makes his lies rather egregious is that a genuine doctoral program in theology is rather rigorous and requires mastery of a number of languages -- Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin, German, and French. I am thinking of programs like those at Yale or Princeton or Claremont -- even Fuller in Pasadena. They are generally more rigorous than most similar liberal arts doctorates. If this liar actually had the degrees he claimed, it would have been a good match.

But -- he can get away with these lies because there are so many sectarian theological schools which no one has heard of, that it makes it easy to make claims like this and not expect people to check them out. And, of course, the quality of the degree from these schools varies greatly.

Wait a minute...

[nschubach]

Did they want to hire him because he did quality work or just because he went to college? I understand the business world takes that sheet of paper almost too serious, but this is ridiculous.

If the kid knows his stuff or knows how to get it, isn't that more valuable than what he wrote for his educational background?

Re:Leave him alone!

[podRZA]

You say "the point of Wikipedia is to get unbiased truth and knowledge" but this is NOT true despite what many think, and it part of why the media hype surrounding Wikipedia is so uncalled for. Wikipedia is exactly what it claims, an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The reality is that it IS truth by consensus even if the consensus is wrong. I'm not saying it is, I don't even have an example, but the point is that it COULD. Don't get me wrong I love Wikipedia, I read it every day probably, but one thing is for sure I'm not going to it for articles in which conflicting opinion are likely.

Re: How will this affect Wikipedia?

[ajs]

Too true. Using Wikipedia for research is always a smart move. Citing it for research clearly indicates you were too lazy to follow up.

Re:Leave him alone!

[sumdumass]

Representing your self as something your not could have even larger reprecusions. Suppose some piece of information is wrong and purposly kept that way because the backers of it are all 24 year old in KY with degrees and jobs that don't exist?

In real life, this could be problematic too. I know of a person who almost died because someone represented themselve as someone they weren't. When riding his motorcycle throught a field and got tangled in some kite string from loose kite, It wrapped around his neck nad was chocking him. Further we couldn't do CPR because his helmate was in the way and we were afraid of removing it becuse of the possibilities of neck and back injuries from when he crashed. You could look in and see he was turning blue and wasn't getting enough air. Finaly I pulled out a pcket knife and started cutting the string from around his neck at the objection of someone else who was saying it would cause him to hemorage and stuff that would surly kill him. We asked himif he was a doctor and he said a medic when in the marines. He wanted us to do nothing until paramedics arived. I didn't think he could last another 15 minutes so i went ahead and cut it. Turns out he was going to be OK and all that happened was the string wraped around his neck and cut the blood flow off to his brain making him dizzy and eventualy passing out while he wrecked somewhere in between. Turned out the EX-marrines medic experince was basic first aid they give everyone and he was never a medic.

Of course this was worse then it could have been because no one else knew what to do outside basic instictual things like cutting the string and what we have seen from TV and such were you don't want to move someone like this if they cannot tell you they are ok. (he was passed out) So our ignorance was just as frightening as his non existant experience. But had we listend to this experience, I would be short a good friend right now. I cannot see any place for claiming you are something that you aren't unless it is in a game or somehow people are supposed to know not to belive you.

Re:Leave him alone!

[doctorcisco]

It doesn't matter what degrees you have under your belt, it's what you DO that matters.

I agree. It's what you do that matters. This guy lies.

If anyone thinks lying about credentials doesn't matter, you're wrong. My Master of Divinity degree required learning to read Latin, German, Koine Greek, and Biblical Hebrew, then basing research conclusions on the linguistic and historical setting of documents written in those languages.

If we're talking theology, or you read something I've written, you need to be able to trust that I do indeed have those skills, and have used them honestly. Like any other kind of specialized knowledge, it's rather easy to put one over on the non-specialist.

Come to think of it, that's been the problem in the theological world for a very long time.

doc

Re:Leave him alone!

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Wikipedia and credentialed systems

[saforrest]

This story has very little to say about the credibility of Wikipedia as a useful source of information.

It's no big shocker that people will lie when they have no oversight and effectively no chance of getting called on it. It happens everywhere, in government, industry, and private relationship. Wikipedia is probably full of liars. That's not to say that getting caught in a lie shouldn't come with a price, and I hope Essjay at the least loses some credibility with Wikipedians!

But Wikipedia's utility as an information source comes from the verifiable facts submitted by contributers. It is these facts, and not contributors' credentials, that are submitted to the rigorous scrutiny, the thousands of eyeballs, the selective forces, that have made Wikipedia as useful as it is now.

If anything, this whole business demonstrates why Wikipedia's lack of official recognition of credentials is a good idea, and why any sort of credential-based system like Larry Sanger's Citizendium had better have some awfully reliable connections to the real world for verifying credentials.

Experts think so

[TamMan2000]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061127-8296 .html

Experts rate Wikipedia's accuracy higher than non-experts

Re:it wont

[Dread Pirate Skippy]

No one is saying that wikipedia is not what it claims to be...it has a bad reputation for this reason:

As for the content, of course the quality of it is questionable. If the quality of content is questionable, of course they have a bad reputation. Their reputation is based on the quality of the content. Almost 90% of the english language articles in wikipedia are are currently not well written, stable, accurate, referenced, and written from a neutral point of view according the guidelines for a "good article" in wikipedia.

Re:Leave him alone!

[IAmGarethAdams]

Lets say I get a job as a shoesalesmen claiming to have a high school diploma instead of a GED and then work my way up to management and am finally instrumental in growing the store into a multi-million dollar chain. Who the hell cares that I lied about some insignificant and unimportant piece of paper? My results are what matter. A degree is a notation at the bottom of your resume that you get as a reward for kissing pompous professor tail for several years not an award of merit.

Or for another example. If a recruit lies about his age to join the military. While in the military forrest carries his fallen comrades out of the jungle and danger and thereby saves 20 lives. Afterward he is awarded a medal of honor for his actions. Would you support an effort to strip the man of the medal he earned with merit because he fibbed on the paperwork to get the opportunity to show that merit?

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?

Re:Citation needed!

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

It would be nice if the submitter actually gave a source for that quote; I couldn't find it in any of the articles.

It's the last sentence of this article, that says: "[...]Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay's invented persona, 'I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.'"

Re:Leave him alone!

[nodnarb1978]

Firstly, I'd have to wonder what impact his fanciful list of credentials had when he was nominated for, and voted on, for his various wikipedia titles.

Secondly, I'd say it's a bad omen: If this guy has used bad faith to attain a "decision-making" position within wikipedia, then what sorts of motivations is this person going to be acting on in their performance of their duties? This issue with "editors" taking biases, then abusing wiki's procedural hierarchy to get "their" way on a contentious issue is hardly new, but this story makes the causes behind many of the potential abuses a bit clearer.

Finally, in the user's bio on wikipedia, I notice about ten years' worth of professional-level work experience, which is a bit abnormal for someone who's only 24 years old and has no degree. More lies?

Crap!

[Malakusen]

Now I have to go find a credible and legitimate source of information for fictional universes from TV shows, and video game settings!

Judith Miller

[mshurpik]

>How will this affect Wikipedia's already shaky reputation with the academic world?

It doesn't. The New York Times has a journalist that pushed for war with Iraq against all available evidence. She goes to the office. She's on payroll. She prints whatever she wants under the banner of the Times.

Wikipedia is no worse than the NYT, and probably better than most.

Re:Judith Miller

[mjeffers]

Judy Miller had to resign, under pressure if you watched the recent episodes of Frontline, from the NYT but Wikipedia thinks this situation (with their admin, not Judy Miller) is OK. Wikipedia is a lot worse than the NYT in this case.

Taiwan

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Taiwan

[Haeleth]

Lets say you want to do a research on the effects of MSG on Obesity You will find that the wiki denies it. "There is no evidence that MSG causes obesity in humans." This could very well be the fact that MSG is billion dollar industry and any Ajimoto can very well afford to pay a "crowd" to maintain that MSG is safe.

Alternatively, it could just possibly be because there is no evidence that MSG causes obesity in humans.

(If MSG causes obesity in humans, then why have China and Japan historically had very low obesity levels, and even today they have far less of an obesity problem than America, despite those cultures having used MSG extensively for far longer than it's been common in the USA? Methinks Americans are eating too much and exercising too little, and trying desperately to find something - anything - to let them avoid taking responsibility for their own unhealthy lifestyles...)

Re:Leave him alone!

[NormalVisual]

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.

The Ivory Tower Will Withstand All Attacks!

[Infonaut]

This is the sort of news bitter academics have desired ever since Wikipedia first hit the mainstream.

The well-adjusted ones are fine with Wikipedia, because they understand that it will never replace true academic research.

Re:Leave him alone!

[BendingSpoons]

If anyone thinks lying about credentials doesn't matter, you're wrong. My Master of Divinity degree required learning to read Latin, German, Koine Greek, and Biblical Hebrew, then basing research conclusions on the linguistic and historical setting of documents written in those languages.

Sorry Essjay, but reinventing yourself on slashdot isn't going to work. I appreciate that you scaled down your credentials from a PhD to a Masters degree, and that you're now indignant about forged credentials, but I'm not buying it.

Re:Leave him alone!

[Literaphile]

You degree is worth the directly career relevent knowledge you gained while in school; not the effort or dedication you put into earning it. If you are being hired by someone objective they will only be interested in things relevent to the position.

Spoken like a university dropout, maybe? This is a bad way to look at things. If anything, being able to work your way through 4 (or more) years of a bachelor's degree, not to mention however many years of graduate school, means that (A) you show commitment to a task, (B) you can finish what you started, (C) you know how to focus, (D) you've learned a ton of analytical, critical thinking, and other related skills. While the stuff you learn in school may not be absolutely, positively, 100 percent applicable to every job you get (and if you think it should be that way, you've got the wrong attitude about academics), it nonetheless teaches a whole load of general working, thinking, analyzing, etc. skills that any employer would find useful.

In short, it is about the effort or dedication you put into earning it. Employers WANT employees who have dedication, and who are willing to exert effort for extending periods of time.

From Essjay

[Garse Janacek]

Essjay's comments on why he did it (from here):

One of the things that tends to happen as you become, let us say, "popular" on Wikipedia is that you attract the attention of an unsavory element. There are a number of trolls, stalkers, and psychopaths who wander around Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects looking for people to harass, stalk, and otherwise ruin the lives of

...

Many people have tried many things to keep thier identities secret: They worry over every little detail they may have released, or refuse to answer anything about themselves, making it very difficult to form any personal ties. Quite unfortunately, it simply isn't possible to keep your details quiet: You will eventually say something that will lead back to you, and the stalkers will find it. My approach was different: I decided to be myself, to never hide my personality, to always be who I am, but to utilize disinformation with regard to what I consider unimportant details: age, location, occupation, etc. As a result, I've made many strong friendships here, because I've always been the person I am, but the stalkers have spent the last two years searching for middle-aged college professors with the initials "SJ" (which are, by the way, my initials) who live in the Northeast; I never had to worry that anything I said would lead back to me, because the areas they focused on, the unimportant statistical information, was a cover

I was actually under the impression that the stalkers and psychopaths were the only people who actually believed the story... [etc.]

(Emphasis mine, of course.) Sooo... yeah. An interesting excuse. The constant references to the stalkers and psychopaths sounds a little paranoid... are there really people who have been trying for two years to figure out who this guy is? I mean, come on...

People just dont care about lies anymore

[qwan]

The comments are surprising, from comparing him to a soldier to saying that his lies is irrelevant as he contributions were good. I can guage what exactly happened. Today with google anyone can be anything you want to. I still remember I used to talk to a girl ;-) and anything she asked me i knew(I am very knowledgable without the help of the wiki :-P). Once she asked me about Existentialism(look up the wiki :-p) and i had never heard of it inspite of the fact that I believed Existentialism(which i came to know later). back to girl when she asked me on yahoo chat i just copy pasted it into my google search bar in firefox. And in minutes i was spewing out names like Nietzsche. She was shocked and asked me how did I know this. She was very impressed I must say. Then I told her that just googled it when she was asking me. Then i gave her links to some essay and quotes. The nest thing she told me "oh so you google everything i ask you". I told her know If i googled it then i would be giving you links. Well coming to the point this essjay started contributing to really "heavy" topics on theology and I am damn sure that he did not want to appear as the guy who googles his information. And he lied about his credentials. He is on an egomanical trip. Wiki is full of them. They take some great pleasure in becoming the "contributors'. No matter what I dont think I will every believe the wiki because many of the contributors are liars like essjay. I do not disagree with the fact that what they contribute may very well be accurate. Seriously I would on trust an economist to do research on economics no a college dropout. Even though I know that I myself can come up with a good report on any economic trend using google but I will never be hired to write for a economic magazine. That is why only a surgeon who has completed his M.D. is allowed to perform surgery. A general practitioner will never be allowed to. In India there was a case of a compounder(a doctors assistant who dispense medicine) who went to a village and became a doctor there. he lied that he was a doctor. He even started performing surgery. He cured many people from malaria and small fever. It is simple we all know that you take a paracetamol for a fever and chloroquine for malaria. He performed surgery for fractures. Once someone discovered he was not a doctor and then he was arrested and it was a big scandal. This led a quack hunt and many quack were arrested. Even thought this doctor had not killed anyone Many of the other quacks had killed a few patients. I would put essjay in the same league. Just because he gave good information about certain topics does not make him an expert. If you read a drug index you can start prescribing tablet for any medicine but it is a very big risk. Just because the "doctor" "saved" so many peooples lives or rather cured so many diseases does qualify him to be glorified. He did not become a "doctor" to save people but rather to make money. Because a person who truly want to serve manking will go and do his medicine. The same way essjay also lied about his credentials not for money but to continue "prescribing" so that he could satisfy his own egomanical desires.

No opportunities to show your expertise!

[douglips]

How are you ever going to show anybody that your that good if they won't give anyone who doesn't have the piece of paper the opportunity? 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.

You're absolutely right. There is no way this Essjay guy would ever have been allowed to edit Wikipedia articles if he hadn't claimed to have 18 degrees.

Re:Leave him alone!

[mmanrrtff]

"but what does this say about academia?" That people in academia don't care about wikipedia?

Credentials/Factual Information = Chicken/Egg?

[XantheKnight]

On one hand, I really like it when news like this makes people realize that they can't just trust a source or a person to deliver correct information, and therefore that critical thought and investigation are key skills in our world. That's a *really* important lesson.

On the other hand, this issue can devolve into a chicken and egg situation. Even if you are a critical thinking, intelligent individual, able to discern trash info from truth, you still need a basis for comparison. To verify the accuracy of information, you either need a knowledgable individual / expert, or a verified factual repository.

If a factual repository is built up by the contributions from knowledgable individuals, but then the credentials of those individuals are found to be fraudulent, the repository becomes useless. Not only have you lost the repository, but you've lost the knowledgable individuals to consult. Logically, you must turn elsewhere altogether for your information.

That's why it's important to protect the credibility, independently, of either (preferably both!) the factual repository, or the knowledgable individuals. If we start developing systems like wikipedia that rely on the latter to construct the former, then we're introducing a chicken-and-egg scenario where a taint on the credibility of either foundation of the system brings the entire thing down en masse. This is especially problematic when lately many have touted wikipedia as some sort of wave of the future in terms of knowledge building, and many similar entities have sprung up, perhaps slowly supplanting other types of factual repositories.

You can't advocate these types of community fact repositories without removing proven fraudulent information and people. Even wikipedia itself acknowledges the need to remove false information-- why are fraudulent individual credentials, then, less important to the authenticity of the whole? If you let people like Essjay continue to contribute and moderate and approve content under false pretenses, then wikipedia becomes a null entity.

In my head, wikipedia and similar entities then become analagous to the trivial solution to an equation.

Jimmy's made an enormous mistake

[Larry Sanger]

There's something utterly breathtaking, and ultimately tragic, about Jimmy telling The New Yorker that he doesn't have a problem with Essjay's lies, and by essentially honoring Essjay after his lies were exposed. As Blogworld quite rightly said, "By his [Jimmy's] actions or lack thereof ... and [by] his words he is endorsing fraud." I've become increasingly disillusioned with Jimmy's behavior, but this I simply wouldn't have expected. It's one thing to revise history self-servingly. But this new incident seems self-destructive on a level beyond previous incidents. Doesn't Jimmy realize that this could well blow up in his face-that it could well be picked up by the news media and severely damage not only Wikipedia's reputation, but Wikia's bottom line (since Wikia is, still, Essjay's employer)? The media is already making some noise (the story broke yesterday) and it's likely only to get hotter. The media now loves a good Wikipedia scandal. Since this one has such a compelling narrative line, and a "you can't make this stuff up" quality to it, how can tech reporters resist? And how can respected observers of the scene then fail to draw some obvious conclusions, as the blogosphere is already doing in its usual vigorous way? Doesn't Jimmy know that this has the potential to be even more damaging to Wikipedia than the Seigenthaler situation, since it reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Wikipedia? (More on my blog...)

Wikipedia equality is a false premise

[David Jao]

The major premise of wikipedia functionality is that it can be edited by anyone, yes?

By far my biggest concern about this scandal is that your premise is actually false, and the falsity of your premise is directly related to the negative consequences of this affair in a very intimate way.

I understand that in an ideal world, anything on Wikipedia can be edited by anyone with no censorship whatsoever, and in an ideal world, two conflicting edits are resolved on the basis of the actual contributions with no regard to credentials or background or the identities of the contributors involved. Unfortunately, Wikipedia falls far short of this ideal in many important instances, and (ironically) the most serious shortcomings emerge during the most serious cases.

For example, let's look at Essjay's talk page as of today, 12:40am eastern time. This is an important article for anyone wishing to voice their opinion on the very matter that we are discussing now. Yet, despite the presence of multiple commentors on that page claiming that content is king and credentials don't matter, the simple fact is you cannot edit that page at all unless you already have an account which has been active for some amount of time, because the page is protected.

This blows a big hole in your assertion that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at any time. I cannot edit this page at the present time, because I don't have an account, and even if I were to create an account, I would have to wait some amount of time before the account would be considered active long enough to edit that page.

Although you may like to think that an obscure user's talk page is not important enough to be considered representative of Wikipedia as a whole, the fact is that the large majority of so-called controversial pages are kept in protected status, with the result that outsiders cannot edit the page.

The sheer hypocrisy of Wikipedia's stance in this matter is astounding. It is far worse than anything I have seen in other notoriously hypocritical arenas such as presidential politics. Wikipedia is saying that, on the one hand, your (academic) credentials are actively immaterial, but on the other hand it considers your (Wikipedia account owning) credentials so essential that it won't even let you post on important matters unless you have a sufficient amount of the latter. If there is a more insidious and adversarial display of censorship to be found anywhere else in the world, I have not seen it.

Moreover, even if I were to by some stroke of fortune create an account and wait the minimum amount of waiting time necessary to post on that page, I would still be attacked on the grounds of having an account that is too new for my comments to merit consideration. See for instance the comment where Netscott dismisses the opinion of Snackycakes on this very basis. Again, it is hard for me to reconcile this blatantly hostile stance with Wikipedia's official (and largely ficticious) policy of honoring contributions based solely on content.

However, on top of this (already long) rant, the absolute worst part is that Essjay is an administrator and a member of the oversight committee, and as such, he has more power on Wikipedia than all but five other people in terms of deciding which pages to protect, which users to ban, and which comments to delete. In other words, Essjay, the very user whose integrity I feel is justifiably subject to question, is in a strong position to disproportionately influence this debate about himself, not because of the merit of his contributions to the debate in question, but because of his...

credentials.

I should close by saying that I am not by any means the anti-Wikipedia zealot that this post makes me out to be. As a matter of fact, I am a founding member of PlanetMath and a strong supp