Essjay scandal

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The Essjay scandal revolves around an administrator of Wikipedia known by the internet alias of Essjay. Essjay claimed to have various religious qualifications. In trying to uncover Essjay's true identity for his Wikipedia Watch "hivemind" site (that exposes the true identities of Wikipedia administrators), Daniel Brandt and Wikipedia Review were able to discover that Essjay was not a religious professor, primarily using the resources of Wikipedia Review.

On 26th July 2006, Daniel Brandt wrote a post to Wikipedia Review titled Who is Essjay?, asking for help to find out Essjay's true identity. As a result of various tips that Daniel Brandt received, both posted in that thread, and given to Daniel Brandt privately as a result of the thread's discussion, Daniel Brandt began to uncover who Essjay really was, and theorised what his real name was.

On 5th March 2007, 7 1/2 months later, Daniel Brandt was shown a post in the New York Times that disagreed with Daniel Brandt's information as to who Essjay was. Daniel Brandt wrote on Wikipedia Review asking for advice as to what to do about this information, and based on that advice decided to write a letter to the New York Times. The result of this is the Essjay scandal, as proof of Essjay's lies, and the various implications that these lies had came to light.

Wikipedia co-founder[1] Jimmy Wales initially supported Essjay's use of a persona, saying, "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it."[2] Later Wales withdrew his support and asked for Essjay's resignation from his positions with Wikipedia and Wikia.[3][2] Wales stated that he withdrew his support when he learned "that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes" on Wikipedia.[4]

The main issue with all of this is not that Essjay had lied but rather that his lies may have influenced the creation of articles. Articles which otherwise would never have been created on Wikipedia, or would have been deleted, or would have been written in a different way may have had their content, and the truth of them changed because of the lies that Essjay had told about who he was. Whilst in theory this should never make a difference, in reality many people believe that it does. Many people believed that Essjay had in fact changed the truth to reflect his world view, and had shown Wikipedia in its worst possible light.

It should be noted that some critics, have long argued that the greatest problem with Wikipedia is in its ability to change truth. The Essjay scandal proved that this issue was far more than just theoretical or a one off, and could be being conducted on a wide scale.

References

Notes

  1. Myers, Peter. The New York Times, 9/20/01
  2. 2.0 2.1 Ratcliffe, Mitch (March 5, 2007), Wikipedia: Why does Essjay need to "protect himself"?, Zdnet.com. Retrieved March 7, 2007.
  3. Cohen, Noam. "Wikipedia ire turns against ex-editor", International Herald Tribune, March 6, 2007
  4. Wales, Jimmy. Wikipedia's WikiEN-l Mailing List, 3/3/07