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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?"
Lying about having a Liberal Arts degree.... that's a new level of desperation. ;)
I see no problem with this current situation.
Dr. Anonymous Coward
Harvard Law
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.
His username is a pseudonym. His claimed credentials are a fraud.
Speaking as a top award-winning particle physicist, race car driver, neurosurgeon, and rock star, I feel that this is absolutely terrible.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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 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.
.400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me
fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.
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
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.
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.
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.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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
"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.
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.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Too true. Using Wikipedia for research is always a smart move. Citing it for research clearly indicates you were too lazy to follow up.
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
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.
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
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.
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