QUOTE(House of Cards @ Wed 3rd September 2008, 4:22am)
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Tue 2nd September 2008, 8:29pm)
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Yeah, just like the Essjay thing never rose to the level of "publicity nightmare". I mean, it never got legs outside of the
usual "WP following" media sources, did it?
But how many of casual readers (and to some extent, contributors) of WP even know about it? I didn't until about a year after the fact, and that was only when I was actively looking for any skeletons in WP's cupboard.
A recent survey demonstrated that 56.4% of casual readers of Wikipedia were able to identify as True that "A college dropout once portrayed himself on Wikipedia as a college professor, while rising to the rank of Administrator on the site". A full 7.9% were able to identify him by name as either "Essjay" or as "Ryan Jordan". Among regular contributors to the encyclopedia, 94.1% identified the statement as "True", and 61.4% were able to name the perpetrator.
This was a proprietary study, though, so I'm not at liberty to release the raw data, or the study sponsor to you.
Additional note: this information, while a complete and utter fabrication, is no less credible than your survey that included one data point.
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Greg