User:Gwen Gale/Essjay thing

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This page in a nutshell: The writer thinks Essjay got mired in Wikipedia's MUD side and that the assertion of any credentials in an edit should be blockable, like a legal threat.

[edit] Stuck in the MUD

The Wikipedia community has been talking about how to carry on and deal with the wider worries brought forth by what Jimmy Wales calls the Essjay scandal, wherein a Wikipedia editor was sent by Wikipedia's management to a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and claimed a MUD CV. I'm all for a ban on bringing up credentials anywhere within the project space. For editors who are asked to take on roles of trust such as CU, arbcomm, spokesperson and so on, I think all that's needed is some discreet due diligence by WMF and/or Wales as with any other responsible org. Moreover, I'd be more than ok with a policy making any assertion of credentials in an editing dispute a blockable thing, like a legal threat. Edits should be supported only by reliable citations, not by arbitrary assertion of authority, which can weaken or be gamed (among other things). A skilled academic is wontedly and thoroughly trained in the craft of backing up assertions with verifiable references and in my experience can quickly use WP's existing citation policies to deal with cranks and other mistaken editors. Lastly, I think a review of Wikipedia's admin selection process is called for. Adminship is too often tied to a buddy system which has no encyclopedic pith but feeds on Wikipedia's cute but often out of hand MUD side (I mean, look what happened to Essjay, I feel bad for him). Gwen Gale 09:36, 5 March 2007 (UTC) updated Gwen Gale 00:20, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What sways

To nick from T.E. Lawrence's account of a chat with Edmund Allenby ninety years ago, Essjay's edits are but a sideshow within a sideshow. The wider worry is he was sent traipsing by Wikipedia management to a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for an interview, in which he represented his MUD CV to her as true enough and was later hired as an employee of Wikipedia's for-profit spinoff. The lid blew off, so to speak, when an acknowledged (and by most accounts, very abrasive and baiting) enemy of Jimbo tipped off the New Yorker that the CV was an utter, made up from whole cloth fraud. Knowing Brandt was responsible, a busy Wales initially blew it off as more trivial meatspace trolling but this was indeed a looming botch, which Wales later admitted and apologized for. Most of us get pangs at the thought of what Essjay must be going through but he let himself be sucked way deep into Wikipedia's MUD side and truth be told, Wikipedia's leadership sent him out into the wild with nothing but lavish praise when all clueless Essjay had to offer the meatspace was his MUD avatar CV, a dodgy thing even at Wikipedia and outright fraud in the real world. Gwen Gale 14:13, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spot on, Florence

So Jimmy Wales came up with this fix. His proposal didn't seem to gain much traction in consensus so I posted this to his talk page. He gave me this somewhat mangled reply which IMHO only showed he either hadn't read what I'd written with any heed, or had misunderstood it altogether. He has since said his proposal has "a lot of support" and has characterized most of the criticism as "a handful of reasonable concerns" and "hysteria." I agree with him on the latter since most of the feedback I've seen about his "vetting lite" proposal has been as careless as his reply to me. That said, he's busy, he's always run this wiki in ways which he thought would alienate the fewest possible number of contributors and mega traffic is the pith, after all, so I can see his side of it: Do as little as possible. Truth be told, this tactic has its helpful breeze. Will this policy help grow a "priestly class" of editors? On some articles this could happen now and then but I still say a strong citation from a reliable source trumps any assertion of authority so for me, if unsupported CVs are deprecated on user pages, it may be enough.

Meanwhile I'm hardcore and as it happens, Florence Devouard, who is chair of the Wikimedia Foundation (which is no longer headed by Wales), hasn't seemed too thrilled with his proposal either, saying, "I think what matters is the quality of the content, which we can improve by enforcing policies such as ‘cite your source,’ not the quality of credentials showed by an editor." Spot on, Florence. Gwen Gale 12:38, 16 March 2007 (UTC)