My God, what
utter bullshit!QUOTE
The stalkers picked up on it immediately (but couldn't believe that a 24 year old had fooled them), but nobody here seemed to notice, which I didn't find particularly odd, since I expected that everybody here knew what was going on.
What stalkers? Since when is Essjay - sorry, "Ryan Jordan" - being
stalked? And by whom? And who does he think was "fooled"? Certainly not us - we've been saying there's something fishy about this guy for months.
Here's what I think happened here: Some nobody working a go-nowhere job, with no academic qualifications to speak of, shows up one day on Wikipedia. He wants to be treated with respect he doesn't deserve, so he lies, and claims to be a college professor.
Tenured, no less! This, on a site that's well-known for being disrespectful towards academics and experts in general - apparently they not only disrespect them as users, they disrespect them as people, too. Enough to treat their accomplishments and titles as just silly little strings of worthless characters that apparently any 22-year-old in a go-nowhere sales job can lay claim to without fear of consequences. After all, "WP:AGF", right?
So he spends practically every waking hour on WP, working his way up the ladder to just about the
very tippy top! And when anybody claims that WP doesn't like experts and academics, they just say "oh, but what about Essjay?" And nobody questions him, because they're dazzled by the Ph.D., and the honor of working with such an "esteemed expert" in Roman Catholicism, or whatever it is he's into. Nobody on WP seems to notice that a "tenured professor" is spending 16 hours a day editing WP, fiddling with templates, closing AfD's and RfA's, and other little chores that a typical college professor would probably find completely beneath them.
Noooo!Of course, we here at Wikipedia Review notice it, particularly Daniel, since he's good at critical thinking, and once it's pointed out it quickly becomes obvious that something weird is happening. But when we raise the question of what the hell is going on, we're accused of what? "Stalking"? Being a "hate site"?
And after all this, he gets a
lovely paying job where presumably he gets to sit at home all day, chat with his friends, and do what he's already addicted to doing anyway - namely, mess around endlessly on WP. Nice work if you can get it! And now they're
patting him on the back, saying "way to go, Essjay! You sure showed
them, huh!"
Why is this not a huge scandal? Why is the media giving this guy a free pass? He's a
total fraud, for shit's sake!