Bloggasm

As Rough Type reports, a New Yorker article last year that profiled Wikipedia doted on a particular Wikipedian who supposedly had a PhD in theology and taught classes, bringing a laptop to his classroom to check Wikipedia in his spare time. This Wikipedian, known as Essjay, was high up in the Wikipedia hierarchy, “one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse.”

According to a recent correction issued in the New Yorker, all this information was fake:

Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page … Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia - a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia - as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

Before, the main debate over Wikipedia’s credibility was centered around the question; “What is authority?” Now, it seems we can’t even get a handle on a person’s credentials enough to even move on to that question.

Nicholas Carr has a poignant post about the two dividing parties in the Wikipedia debate. On one side, we have the “deletionists,” who think that Wikipedia should be monitored for irrelevant material that should be deleted, while the other side is made up of “inclusionists,” who think that anything is fair game to be included in Wikipedia.

The rules that govern how the popular online encyclopedia works are set by its community of contributors - the so-called wikipedians - through a process of argument and consensus-building. But the community has begun to split into two warring camps with contrary philosophies about Wikipedia’s identity and purpose. On one side are the deletionists; on the other are the inclusionists. Between them is not a middle ground but a no-man’s-land. As one Wikipedia observer recently put it, “The inclusionist versus deletionist debate is as firm and strong as the abortion debate, gun control debate, or the death penalty debate.”

If I had to pick a side I’m on, I’d say I’m an “inclusionist,” simply because we’re talking Wiki here, and being an inclusionist seems to be the very heart of what a wiki is. Also, what would be the factors involved when considering what we should delete and what we should keep? If we were to go the way of the deletionists, the debate wouldn’t stop, it would just continue to go on over what should be deleted. If we go towards the inclusionists, then the debate theoretically stops, since there is no bar to be set based on imaginary standards.