QUOTE(the fieryangel @ Thu 1st March 2007, 3:06pm)
So, I think that Wikipedia just bought stock in a growth industry....If I wrote for the Journal of Higher Education, I might be interested in exploring this further for an article there.....
I'll say! Now that this is starting to finally hit the fan (where it belongs, IMO), I suspect this situation will give us enough lies, distortions, and hypocrisies to last us for months. (And it's not like we didn't have enough to begin with!)
Just in the last two days, there's been a huge amount of activity - mostly on
Jimbo's talk page, but now starting on WikiEN-L and elsewhere, with people finally starting to come to grips with what's going on. And I guess I can't resist quoting Dave Gerard's typical treatment of the facts:
QUOTE
I was most amused to see Daniel Brandt ranting about it, considering that avoiding Brandt's blatant stalking and harassment of editors was one of the main reasons for Essjay doing it.
Never mind that it isn't "stalking" or "harassment" at all, not even close, and that such a claim is clearly libelous. He's actually claiming that Essjay started deceiving the WP community at least
six months before anyone at Wikipedia had any dealing with Brandt whatsoever! Sure, he isn't the only one doing that, but still...
Good ol' Dave! Always reliable! (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/laugh.gif)
I've also seen things like User:JzG referring to Essjay's deception as "a bit of Walter Mittyism"; User:Betacommand claiming that "plain and simple Essjay was attempting to protect his physical person," as if being a tenured professor with two Ph.D.'s somehow lends you greater protection than being, say, a 23-year-old paralegal (I would think just the opposite!); various (false) claims that most, if not all, of the AnonIP's contributing to the discussion are actually Daniel Brandt, along with openly libelous statements about him; utterly priceless bits from someone calling himself "ChipClip" such as, "if the New Yorker is stupid enough to believe everything everyone tells them, that's their problem," and "get over your moral snobbiness"; and of course, User:Pschemp's comment in response to User:Makemi's point that Essjay could have chosen a non-expert fake identity if all he wanted to do was "protect himself" from "stalkers":
QUOTE( @ 20:46, 1 March 2007 (UTC))
Ok, seriously, you need to prove that allegation. He has explicitly stated he did that to protect his identity. Find me an example of him using that to leverage on wiki debates.
Which, of course, was followed by several examples of that very thing!
Last but not least, I, too, am seeing a lot of this sort of thing:
QUOTE(User:ObiterDicta @ 21:51, 28 February 2007 (UTC))
But unless he tried to persuade people of his views with respect to articles on religion (and I didn't check and don't know one way or the other) why would this necessarily matter?
As has been mentioned already, these people
don't even bother to check Essjay's long history of contribs relating to the Catholic Church - they just come right out and say what they think Jimbo wants to hear.