You're forgetting that he once claimed on his user page that he held the following degrees:
* Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies (B.A.)
* Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.)
* Doctorate of Philosophy in Theology (Ph.D.)
* Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD)
The New Yorker, famous for its fact-checking, was completely snookered:
QUOTE
KNOW IT ALL: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?
by Stacy Schiff
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-07-31, Posted 2006-07-24
...
One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he contributed to articles in his field -- on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends. (To his knowledge, he has never met another Wikipedian, and he will not be attending Wikimania, the second international gathering of the encyclopedia's contributors, which will take place in early August in Boston.)
...
Essjay is serving a second term as chair of the mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed.
...
Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats. "There are people who take Wikipedia way too seriously," he told me. (Wikipedians have acknowledged Essjay's labors by awarding him numerous barnstars -- five-pointed stars, which the community has adopted as a symbol of praise -- including several Random Acts of Kindness Barnstars and the Tireless Contributor Barnstar.)
...
Wales recently established an "oversight" function, by which some admins (Essjay among them) can purge text from the system, so that even the history page bears no record of its ever having been there. Wales says that this measure is rarely used, and only in order to remove slanderous or private information, such as a telephone number.
Ryan Jordan's "friends" on Facebook include Angela Beesley, James Forrester, Shanel Kalicharan, Gil Penchina, Jimmy Wales, and Kat Walsh. I cannot tell how long each has been on his friends list. Those are just the names I recognize. There are some names from this list of friends who live near him in Kentucky, which might be useful for anyone investigating if he really exists.
I might write to
The New Yorker and complain about their fact-checking, and ask for a retraction and investigation.
Stacy Schiff, the author of the piece in
The New Yorker, is a "Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who lives in New York City. She is a graduate of Phillips Academy and Williams College. She was a Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990 whose essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and The Times Literary Supplement. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities."
Maybe some enterprising admin on this board can contact Ms. Schiff, and ask how she got snookered by Wikipedia. Then he could post her reply on this board.
If we can put some meat on this story, it might make an interesting page on wikipedia-watch.org. The significance here is that it not only serves as a critique of Wikipedia (which Jimmy and Angela wouldn't mind throwing to the dogs at this point), but also of Wikia (which they love dearly because there's big bucks involved).