What to make of wiki
Wikipedia has sort of become the uber information source online for just about anything you want background on, from a brief rundown to an encyclopedic reference. Trouble is, it’s written – and always open to updating – by anyone at all with a computer and some information, whether true or false. It’s only minimally overseen by a few.
And that’s causing more trouble, now.
In a blink, the wisdom of the crowd became the fury of the crowd.
In the past few days, contributors to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, have turned against one of their own who was found to have created an elaborate false identity.
Under the name Essjay, the contributor edited thousands of Wikipedia entries and once was one of the few people with the authority to deal with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors.
To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile.
But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and who lives outside Louisville.
Jordan contended that he resorted to a fictional persona to protect himself from people who might be angered by his administrative role at Wikipedia. He did not respond to an e-mail message, nor to messages conveyed by the Wikipedia office.
Can you believe this? No, that’s precisely the point. Wiki had established such a regular and trusting worldwide horde of users who trusted its basic credibility. But one of its main editors was working under a fraudulent identity.
The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process — all editing of entries is marked and saved — allows readers to react to suspected fraud.
That transparency is ultimately necessary and good.
The deception by Jordan came to public attention last week when The New Yorker magazine published a rare editors’ note saying that when it wrote about Essjay as part of a lengthy profile of Wikipedia, “neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name,” and that it took Essjay’s credentials and life experience at face value.
What? The New Yorker magazine doesn’t do any fact-checking? Are the trimmed down elite media so short-staffed or overworked that they have no time or manpower to verify information before publishing it? Verification is part of the work in journalism.
In an e-mail message Friday, The New Yorker deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, said: “We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia’s confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him. In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay’s identity beyond what he told us.”
The mainstream media do not make corrections without some angst, and usually a little last moment resistance.
The New Yorker note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the growth of the site. “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it,” he said.
No problem with fraudulent misrepresentation of an editor’s credentials? So what are we to make of information on wikipedia after that?
