FYI: Wikipedia scandal
Turns out the Wikipedian who calls himself “Essjay” interviewed by Stacy Schiff in the New Yorker article that you read for class was not the person that he claimed to be. His dishonesty with the Wikipedia community and with the media has sparked a new round of soul-searching in the Wikipedia community. Andrew Lih has the most thorough updates here, here, and here.
Some other articles here and here, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a blog post about it… and via a Technorati search on “wikipedia+essjay” there are lots of blog posts about it which you can see here.
UPDATE (3/7): “Essjay” stepped down. Details from Andrew Lih and the New York Times.
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Andrew Lih
March 5, 2007 @ 9:28 am
Glad to see the class is learning about (sadly) the phenomena of online identity, peer production and trust. It has not diminished Wikipedia’s popularity and usefulness, but it certainly is a crisis in credibility that I’m confident the community will find a way to solve.
kumarpalekar
March 5, 2007 @ 11:02 pm
Credibility cannot be regulated by the rise or fall in popularity gauges. Those are completely two different ratios of measurement.
If the community needs to solve these issues, then Jimmy Wales should stop his charitable philosophy and introduce a paid & intelligent civil service to protect and govern it.
Wikipedia is a valuable resource that should not be judged by popularity norms but must, instead be run on serious and strong foundations of trust, accuracy and credibility.