Read me first | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Technology
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive
Seth Finkelstein
Thursday March 08 2007
The Guardian
Wikipedia’s latest scandal is the revelation that a very high-ranking administrator, and employee (until this month) of an associated commercial venture, Wikia, had falsified his academic credentials. Concerns had been voiced by critics for a long time but the issue was validated by the publication of a correction added to a New Yorker article about Wikipedia. It said: “[A contributor called Essjay] was described in the piece as ‘a tenured professor of religion at a private university’ with ‘a PhD in theology and a degree in canon law’ … Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is 24 and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught.”
The misrepresentation was confirmed when, as part of the Wikia hiring process, accurate details of his identity were presumably required. Much discussion of the scandal has focused on how poorly the executive management handled everything, from initial vetting to subsequent explanations of the deception. But the deepest lesson is what this tells us about the social dynamics driving participation in Wikipedia.
Read on at the Guardian technology blog, URL/link above.
