With Wikipedia, what you see is not always what you get

What’s one of the best sections of any newspaper or magazine? The corrections section. In the case of the New Yorker, these come under the heading of the Editors’ Note. And the most recent issue has quite the doozy:

The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, “Know It All,” by Stacy Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator and contributor called Essjay, whose responsibilities included handling disagreements about the accuracy of the site’s articles and taking action against users who violate site policy. He was described in the piece as a “tenured professor of religion at a private university’ with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.” …

Essay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advance degrees, and that he has never taught.

Whoops. If only it ended there. Wikipedia, always one to get a little sensitive over questions about the credibility of its editors, initially stood by its man. But his Wikipedia user page now says he’s “no longer active on Wikipedia.”

In a farewell message, Essjay wrote, “it’s time to make a clean break.” Though he claims to have received “an astounding amount of support,” the site’s user forums had become awash in harsh comments for Essjay, calling him a fraud and worse. There was talk of reviewing the thousands of articles he edited to see if he used his false credentials improperly while acting as one of the site’s few officially empowered moderators. At least one instance came to light right away: 

In a discussion over the editing of the article with regard to the term “imprimatur,” as used in Catholicism, Essjay defended his use of the book “Catholicism for Dummies,” saying, “This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s credibility.”

Perhaps that errant apostrophe should have been a tip-off.