I'm getting angry with those who fail to see that there was an issue of journalistic ethics involved, even if it only involved
an appearance of a conflict of interest.
I'm beginning to feel that her swan song on her Talk page should have been more of an apology and less of an implicit attack on me.
Accordingly, I have emailed Kelly McBride, the ethics columnist at the Poynter Institute, and asked her to interview her. We need to hear from other professional jouranlists about who is right in this situation and who is wrong. Here is a copy of that email, minus my personal contact information:
QUOTE
kmcbride at
poynter.orgDear Ms. McBride:
I think you should interview a reporter for the Congressional Quarterly, (name redacted). Two days ago I did online research and discovered that this was her real identity. My interest in her was initiated by the fact that she is an anonymous administrator at Wikipedia.
I have a problem with Wikipedia, and am trying to identify as many of the 900 administrators as I can. Over half of them use pseudonyms on Wikipedia. Some of them are impossible to trace, while others have inadvertently left sufficient evidence on the web in various places, so that with several hours of online research, and some luck, I can figure out their real identity.
Katefan0 (that's a zero on the end) was her user name. She mentioned that she was a journalist in Washington DC on her user page. This interested me because I feel that it is a conflict of interest for a journalist to use a pseudonym and edit Wikipedia.
The situation was compounded by the fact that she is an administrator. She has the power to block other editors, protect pages from editing, or delete pages. In other words, the power to shape content beyond that which mere Wikipedia editors are given.
When I figured out her identity, it turned out that she is on the Congressional beat and has a Senate gallery press pass. It was also evident from her history of edits on Wikipedia that she did not feel the need to recuse herself from edits on articles about members of Congress.
I asked her to identify herself on her user page, and state that she was employed by the Congressional Quarterly. I did this because in addition to the fact that I'm trying to identify all administrators at Wikipedia, this case seemed to present a clear conflict of interest. I believe it was a violation of professional journalistic ethics for her to continue to remain anonymous as a Wikipedia administrator.
She left Wikipedia that same day. Her swan song, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Katefan0 was an effort to put me on the defensive. Now I'm taking a lot of heat from her colleagues at Wikipedia, who are calling me names on their IRC channel. An example on the Talk page of my own biography -- a biography that I've been trying unsuccessfully to get deleted for seven months now -- is at the bottom of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Daniel_BrandtThere is a long thread at
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=1422 where I have explained a number of details and defended myself. My interest in having Poynter discuss this is to get some input from professional journalists on the ethical issues I've tried to raise. Katefan0's colleagues at Wikipedia who are denouncing me seem to have little awareness of these ethical issues.
Regards,
Daniel Brandt, president
Public Information Research, Inc.
www.wikipedia-watch.org
Professional journalist is an anonymous admin
