Overview of the recent serious Wikipedia scandal March 4, 2007
Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Wikipedia.trackback
You may hear about the ongoing scandal in Wikipedia these days. User:Essjay lied about his real job and qualification. According to his archived wiki user page:
I am a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States; I teach both undergraduate and graduate theology. I have been asked repeatedly to reveal the name of the institution, however, I decline to do so; I am unsure of the consequences of such an action, and believe it to be in my best interests to remain anonymous.
”’I hold the following 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)
But after accepting a job at Wikia (a for-profit project of Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley), he told them about his real identity. Essjay is a 24-year-old from Kentucky with perhaps no college degree at all. I don’t want to repeat others, so take a look at the best summary of the whole story: Wikipedia Crisis in 60 Seconds. Here is a The New Yorker article on the subject.
The Wikiblog also featured the scandal and here is a wiki podcast if you want to listen to it.
The reason I’m writing about it. I knew Essjay, he was considered one of (if not) the best administrators in the English Wikipedia. I’ve been following his work and contributions for a long time as I wanted to learn from him. Today, he left a message on his talk page about leaving the project and ending his incredible wiki career.
My comments here will be short and to the point: I’m no longer taking part here. I have received an astounding amount of support, especially by email, but it’s time to go. I tried to walk away in August, and managed to do so for quite a while, but I eventually came back, because of the many requests I received urging me to return. Many of you have written to ask me to not leave, to not give up what I have here, but I’m afraid it’s time to make a clean break.
I ask that the first steward to see this message please remove my various flags from this wiki, as well as from Meta, Commons, and Wikiquote, and remove the bot flags from my bots, which of course will no longer be running. My tools will be taken down shortly. I had planned to delete my user-space myself, but I don’t want anyone to think I was going on a rampage, so instead, I ask that one or more administrators who are friends please delete the 288 pages that form my userspace (leaving only my userpage and this talk page).
I’ve enjoyed my time here, and done much good work; my time, however, is over, and leaving is the best thing for me and for Wikipedia. I walk away happy to be free to go about other things. I hope others will refocus the energy they have spent the past few days in defending and denouncing me to make something here at Wikipedia better.
With love to all who have been my friends here, Essjay (Talk) 03:17, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
Have we been betrayed? Yes, but to be honest, I don’t care about it. I love Wikipedia because you’re rated by your work. He has made an unbelievable job for Wikipedia, he’s been a great editor and a perfect admin. I’ll miss him. We all will miss him.
In a previous blog post – http://blog.xodp.org/2007/03/credentialists-and-impostors.html – I stated that I would like to see Essjay make a fresh start at Wikipedia under the protection of a new, anonymous pseudonym. However, that’s not possible unless Essjay retracts his rather bizarre claim about Stacy Schiff offering him compensation for his time. And given the fact that a substantial number of Wikipedians remain stuck in denial and steadfast in their support of Essjay, it is highly unlikely that he will ever offer a retraction or an apology.
i still like wikipedia…
You’re right. He could even edit Wikipedia anonymously. But we’ll never know about it.
BTW, you create interesting posts on wiki and Citizendum.
The whole question of who has the right to write about something, credentials for writing, is so interesting…If what Essjay wrote was valid and interesting, does it matter if he isn’t who he said he was? I wonder about the whole question. It is like art fraud – if no-one can tell the difference, is there a difference? If there is a difference, what is the difference?
I will not miss him. Even in his goodbye message, he takes no responsibility for his lying; in fact, he implies that he just decided that it was time to leave.
Kim, it makes an enormous difference. An encyclopedia is not a piece of art. Essjay used his supposed credentials to push viewpoints and evaluate reference works. For instance, as a physician, I occasionally contribute to medical articles on Wikipedia. Wikipedians know this and will often ask me for help on specific articles or to resolve a question or dispute relating to some medical topic. If I were not really a physician, but just someone with some interest in medical topics (say I studied some physiology in college), my work could have an adverse effect on the quality of the articles, as I guided them towards my (faulty or incomplete) understanding. Just because the average person is not qualified to judge the difference doesn’t make it less important—the end result becomes less accurate, of poorer quality, and damages the encyclopedia.
Whatever your position on this it does enormous damage to the credability of Wikipedia and why some like me will always treat it as a place to start research not finish it…
I would NEVER treat Wikipedia as a place to finish research. What matters most, of course, is not the paper qualificiations by the quality of the contributions, but lying about the qualificationbs casts doubt on the value of the contributions.
Folks lying on the internet?!?!? Now there’s a surprise! Maybe all those 14 year old girls really are 14 year olds instead of being 30 year old males still living at home with their mothers.
Wikipedia has issues. Many issues. Their own staff doesn’t follow their own rules, spammers galore, the recent nofollow tagging for all external links while millions of links go to them, funding, etc. This is just another example of what Wikipedia has turned into: another lawless example of what’s wrong with the internet. It’s quickly becoming another DMOZ.
Wikipedia will recover from this and still has plenty of time to get its own house in order. Why? For a very large majority of savvy internet users Wikipedia is only just coming on to their radar.
While a knowledgeable (but growing) minority utilize the tool as frequently as the rest of us would utilize Google for searches, its utilization is mostly by the learning and contributing academic community. Most of the people that come across Wikipedia do so either by accident through click-throughs or because Google brought them there.
I asked a dozen people (friends) who I consider intelligent and net savvy, to tell me if they had Wikipedia bookmarked in their internet browsers. Although 9 of the 12 knew what Wikipedia was and had used it on one or more occasions, only two people had it bookmarked as a favorite.
In my opinion, until such time as Wikipedia is as widely accepted and considered a first-stop lookup source of definitive and reliable information as that encyclopedia, dictionary or thesaurus on your real-world bookshelf, it will remain nothing more than an alternative source of information. The ’scandal’ is only of importance to those who consider Wikipedia to be more than it is, an intellectual community blog.
does anyone know if essjay hasn’t already made a fresh start at Wikepedia? Maybe he is using that annonymus pseudonym and has been for the last few weeks/months. We may never kinow until another highly quilified very interesting writer is exposed as this same kid from Kentucky.
Anyway i say long live creative writing – any one who uses wickepedia as gospel is going to get burned
Lies always is a symble of bad manner and behaviour.Wikpedia can help to discipline writers by revealing the truth behind cause it covers broad areas and has many readers.
If Essjay is editing wiki anonymously, we’ll never know about it.
Ok, an apology could have been nice, but I still don’t care about it. He has done an incredible job in Wikipedia, that’s why I’ll miss him.
Credibility: it’s my fault if I can’t decide whether a sentence is reliable or not. Why? If I find a statement, data, number in the article without a proper reference, I’ll not trust that sentence even if a professor wrote that…
Why will Wikipedia recover from this scandal? Because we always have problems, issues (stable version, anonym editors, article rating, featured articles, stubs…), and such a big community can’t avoid strikes like this one.
Why does Wikipedia still have a future? Have your read The Wisdom of Crowds from James Surowiecki? There is the answer…
It’s nice that he was able to contribute to Wikipedia, or any other online community, but lying about your credentials is a BIG NO-NO. Lying about having 2 doctorate degrees reduces you to a lying scumbag.
I know some people, for various reasons (like money, marriage, personal problems) can’t go to school, but if you didn’t it is a disservice to the readers. Don’t claim things you are not and then claim to have the authority and expertise to write about something.
Wikipedia definitely has a future, but not this guy. Sorry, it is what it is.
Ooops, I meant to say:
“If you didn’t go to school and CLAIM YOU DID, then it is a disservice to the readers. ”
By the way, plenty of people don’t get the chance to go to school and are no the less intelligent, and contribute to society just the same. But if were not able to go to school, don’t lie about it, because you’ll get busted. This can be checked quite easily by anyone.
Like you say there is a difference between intelligence and education.
Wikipedia is still surely a brillaint start to any kind of research and will survive this. imho.
[...] sin tener otro título que el bachillerato, cosa común entre nuestra clase política, sino que se presentó a sí mismo como un catedrático de una universidad privada, con un grado medio en Estudios Religiosos, un [...]
I agree totally with Steve. It’s a good place to begin research, though.
Also, if Essjay had been honest about his credentials and then gone on to do the same level of work, people would have been saying, “That is one intelligent guy for only 24.”
Everyone agrees, it seems, that he caused damage to wikipedia, and for this reason alone (besides his stupidity) he should have been fired.
The exact reason why you MUST double check wiki-citations.
In NO form of non-fiction writing is misrepresentation welcome. And for good reason. But an isolated instance shouldn’t bring a respected institution/publication down. If the instances should cease to be isolated, that would be different.
I will continue to use Wikipedia on my blog as a pointer to information that I find reasonably accurate and that does not feed the commercial machines. It is NOT a “final word” tool. NO secondary source is. One can find dross in the Encyclopedia Brittanica just like in Wikipedia. You just have to pay more for it. EVERYTHING you find in the world of information should be checked.
Intelligence is a funny thing. Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences approach has saved many a child from being chided for not having a high “IQ” — but for being intelligent (and possibly genius) in other areas.
However intelligent Essjay might be, the bottom line is he lied. We impeached a president for that. We sent Enron’s chief execs to prison for that.
“But he’s simply lying about his education” one might say. What about the guy who lied about his education at the Idaho National Laboratory a few years back, stating he had a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, when in fact, he had no such degree. Do we want people like this tinkering around with nuclear materials?
Okay, Wikipedia is ‘information.’ But sometimes people make important decisions based on information they read.
I certainly don’t want to sound like a snob, but to pawn oneself as holding all those degrees is a slap in the face to those who study and sacrifice countless hours to EARN their degrees — and play by the rules.
I can equate it also to serving in the military (which I did) and seeing people wearing ribbons on their chest that they did not earn. It is tremendously offensive to those who actually earned them.
Heck, I could go back and forth and argue both sides of this with equal fervor, but when it all boils down, I think truth and honesty and integrity should be our standard.
Dan Bobinski
President, Leadership Development, Inc. and
The Center for Workplace Excellence (blog)
Update: here is the apology from Essjay.
Dan: it’s a great summary. Thank you!
The most important part of your opinion is:
[...] that the community will keep the article again. On his website, Wikipedia Watch, he features the Essjay story (just an update: Essjay [...]
[...] days, I wonder now where does one go for help with settling disputes. And with the recent Wikipedia scandal, I can’t help feel somewhat… uneasy, or wary, about Wikipedia period. A contributor [...]
[...] Verification? Jimbo Wales’ suggestion to avoid scandals like the recent one. I’m against the idea (if it’s totally voluntary, then I have no problems with that). [...]
Up to 9 months ago we financially contributed funds to Wikipedia but no more, for we thought that it was a good idea and where its thinking was in unison with our own at that time – using knowledge for the good of humankind. When we as novices tried to place our Swiss charity within Wikipedia we were absolutely savaged by the editors. They in fact blocked our right of reply, which is documented by themselves.
Thereafter we even sent our registration documents via email to the then executive director of Wikimedia, the holding organization, to prove that our international group was registered as a Swiss charity. He did nothing at all. A few months later he resigned with another top Wikimedia executive, ‘Jimbo’s second in command. The greatest problem with Wikipedia that we now find is that they are highly selective in who should place information and where therefore they will never really have a web-based encyclopaedia that is unbiased and totally factual. It is ultimately at the whims of the few enlightened ones who control what should be a great reference. Unfortunately we now see that it is not.
For anyone interested further on how Wikipedia editors work, the full account including all emails will be part of our next web newsletter ‘Scientific Discovery’. It will be on-line by the end of July 2007. Overall, it is time we feel that Wikipedia looked internally at itself and that they concluded that they have major problems with the way they treat new entrants. This analysis should especially be directed towards the attitude of their editors, who remove the right of reply and delete super-quick for reasons not based on evidence but only hearsay. By the way also, the Wikipedian Editor Zoe who first blocked us and the initial instigator of all the basic trouble, fell out with ‘Jimbo’ and where she as well left a few months later. Apparently she had made a vendetta against a certain professor according to ‘Jimbo’s’ opinion. Thereafter she took her bat and ball home and has never been seen since. I believe she also threatened the embattled professor at the time – the web link is http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:dUfUXyA24wwJ:www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Zoe+zoe+wikipedia+professor+change+wikipedia&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=uk.
Dr. David Hill
Chief Executive
World Innovation Foundation Charity (reg. no. CH-035.7.035.277-9 – 11th July 2005)
Bern, Switzerland
Hello everybody,
So, let’s chat! What’s going on?
[...] Wikipedia’s format is indeed open — sometimes too open (see e.g. this and this, and this parody too) — the site generally has tools that can be used to backtrack edits and [...]