Who is Essjay?, Probably he's Ryan Jordan Options

[LamontStormstar]

As I've stated before - I think this work in exposing Wikipedia is important, and I'm grateful to his and everyone's work on this. I also think it is important to have alternatives, even multiple alternatives to Wikipedia, particularly in areas such as biographies, historical articles and political articles, since I think this is where Wikipedia really is the pits. I feel Wikipedia is a great idea by Larry Sanger which Jimbo Wales ruined, and the baby (Sanger's idea) should not be thrown out with the bathwater. Perhaps Citizendium, or Demopedia or Dkosopedia or one of these Wikipedia competitors or niche sites will take off. Wikipedia's weak point is not it's mathematical and scientific articles, some of which honestly are quite good, they are with the horrible biographical, historical and political articles. I think Wikipedia's first successful competitor will focus on these areas in a more honest, unbiased (or differently biased) way, with perhaps better community self-administration without the cabal nonsense.

Wikipedia has to go with free labor in most of the high-level people running the place. They have only a few people actually paid--I think one IT person, one programmer (out of dozens of free developers), and one lawyer.

And they don't do much in the way of background screening, which is especially difficult if you don't meet face to face (even for face to face, there are all these illegal immigrants in the USA who committ identity theft to make fake idenities anyway). I think even when elected to arbcom, background checks are lacking.



This post has been edited by LamontStormstar: Sun 4th March 2007, 4:05pm

[anon1234]

I tried twice to ask Wikia.com if they have verified Ryan Jordan's personal information on his Wikia.com user page. I was stonewalled both times. The first email was to Carol Wentworth, their PR agent, on Jan 22. The second was to Gil Penchina, Angela Beesley, and Wentworth on Feb 19. The only response was an "out of office" reply from Wentworth both times. It looks to me like the insiders knew they were sitting on a powder keg, and instructed Ms. Wentworth to ignore me. When a deputy editor at The New Yorker responded to my inquiry on February 9, she said that this was the first time that they had heard that there was a problem with Essjay.

Put this all together, and you have a case study of how a corporation should not do public relations. If you're going to hire a PR agent, you have to give them some freedom to do their job when someone like me says that there's this smoking gun that seems interesting. You don't tell them to ignore me. Instead, you at least pretend that you're letting the PR person do some damage control.

If you're really serious about running a good company, you'd call up The New Yorker yourself and confess that one of your employees, whose ass got immediately fired, managed to scam everyone. That's what should have happened within a few days of Jan 22. If they'd been reading this board, they would have gone into action even sooner.

My advice to any venture capitalist is to stay away from Wikia, Inc. They're a bad investment.

Daniel! This is important. You need to put together a press release documenting the sequence of events and citing the New Yorker and Jimbo's statements and send it off to AP, Reuters, NYT, WP, WSJ and LAT. Use the upside down pyramid news story format. Write it as if it were a proper news story that they could almost cut and paste. Don't make it all about you, but make sure you mention yourself accurately in the story. It should be no more than 3/4 of a page single spaced. Give the background you just explained above. Include your phone number for an interview. This is the next step and its ready to go. You might as well issue the press release as if it were from your "Wikipedia Watch" group.

This post has been edited by anon1234: Sun 4th March 2007, 4:57pm

[Somey]

I was just blocked for "personal attacks" due to a comment I left on EssJay's talk page....

So that's who you are on Wikipedia! I always wondered who that was. I think you were the last person who tried to write an article about us there, weren't you? Thanks for trying...

Well as the 'cultish cabal'er' that blocked you, I have only one question. Why is it that when people are blocked for an inability to conduct a civil rational debate, they run here and try to pass themselves off as heroic martyrs to free-speech?

Well, that's a fair question. I think lots of people just get emotional when they get blocked, which makes them feel like they have to vent some steam, preferably in a sympathetic forum - and Wikipedia doesn't operate a forum of its own for people who have just been blocked, so... presto bingo! They come here.

The real question is, why do people feel the need to vent in public at all when they've just been involved in a dispute of some kind, and been (in their estimation, at least) mistreated because of it? I think it's one of the more invidious aspects of the "new cyberculture" - people who, as recently as the early 1990's, would have simply left the house, taken a walk, and played with the cats for a few hours after such an argument now feel compelled to stay online, defend their cyber-reputations, and in some cases actually ramp up the hostility.

I'm not sure what Wikipedia can do about it, other than what they're doing now, which is nothing... To some extent I think we're providing them with a very valuable service here by being the "port of last resort" for people in that position. And in almost all cases, the people in question calm down within a couple of days, and (assuming they stick around) they generally have good points to make about what's wrong with the system.

Anyway, Doc, I want to personally thank you for all you've done lately to help out with the Brandt situation, and maybe I few others recently that I shouldn't mention... Despite what Olivier says, you seem to be one of the most principled admins they've got over there, and that still counts for a lot with me. I think it would be a shame if you left WP, but it's not like I wouldn't understand why!

[Alkivar]

Essjay retired. See [[User_talk:Essjay]].

I agree with the opinion posted that he should not do something as cowardly as leave, and instead do the needful and stay to regain Wikipedia's trust.

Leaving when things get tough is the coward's way out and it's also the easy way out.

So what is an obsessed 24-year old Wikipedia addict going to do now?

create a sockpuppet and grow it using yet another bogus set of credentials (albeit not so overreaching) until it too has a position of authority....

Its ok to be cynical now right?

[Jonny Cache]

So what is an obsessed 24-year old Wikipedia addict going to do now?

Create a sockpuppet and grow it using yet another bogus set of credentials (albeit not so overreaching) until it too has a position of authority ...

It's ok to be cynical now right?

What makes you think he doesn't have 7 or 8 of them already incubating in the vats?

(You have a lot to learn about being cynical ...)

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Sun 4th March 2007, 8:30pm

[gomi]

I was just blocked for "personal attacks" due to a comment I left on EssJay's talk page.

Well as the 'cultish cabal'er' that blocked you, I have only one question. Why is it that when people are blocked for an inability to conduct a civil rational debate, they run here and try to pass themselves off as heroic martyrs to free-speech?

I've had a lot of disagreements with folk that post here, but even I don't thing they are stupid or bloody-minded enough to confuse inarticulate incivility with nobility of cause.

Well, I guess I'm one of those that disagree with you here, Doc. Wikipedia tries to have it both ways: be an "encyclopedia anyone can edit", but insisting on these vague notions of AGF, NPA, and NPOV. If you are going to invite into your reference work any teenager, zealot, bigot, and high-school dropout who has a computer and only enough brain cells to hit the <Enter> key, then you are going to get postings you don't like. You're going to get flat-earthers, segregationists, religious zealots, and every other kind of nutcase you can imagine, and you're also going to get people who may be none of the above, but whose idea of "telling the truth" may upset those of more refined or delicate constitutions.

In most liberal society, we make the judgement that the best antidote to bad (or hateful) speech is more speech, not less. Wikipedia gets this wrong. The definition of a "personal attack" is so vague and shifting that it serves as one of those laws that everyone, at one point or another, breaks, making iits selective enforcement a mechanism to purge those you don't like.

This selective enforcement (and interpretation) reinforces the role of power in Wikipedia. If SlimVirgin launches a "personal attack" ("You make no contribution .. all you are is trouble") on Kim van der Linde, for example, it is explained away, oversighted, or just plain ignored. But if a normal, or perhaps sub-normal (inexperienced) editor makes an equally strong statement ("Essjay is a liar"), then it's a personal attack, and if there is an admin around with an interest in defending the topic, his turf, or some generalized-but-unstated Wiki ethos, down comes the block-hammer.

Mr. Besancenot will survive his 48-hour block without ill effect, no doubt. However, a subset of admins seem to only have an "indefinite" setting on their block button, which is often applied to anyone who seriously disagrees with them on their favortite topics. Others, lke Jayjg, routinely fish with Checkuser to ban everything he doesn't like ("it's a Tor proxy!", "vandalism-only account!", "reincarnation of blocked user"). These people, like Essjay, contribute to making Wikipedia a laughing-stock. Admins like you, Mr. Glasgow, serve to perpetuate that status quo. Whether that makes you part of the problem or merely a bystander I do not know, but I won't be taking any advice on civility from you or any other Wikipedia admin until you clean house.

This post has been edited by gomi: Sun 4th March 2007, 11:17pm

[Jonny Cache]

The worst offenses against accuracy, balance, civility, and diversity on Wikipedia continue to be perpetrated by the Activist Subcabal, and the rest of the Administrative Apparatus (read "tools") are just so many weenies who fail to stop it.

Jonny

[Somey]

Speaking of the activist subcabal, this might a good opportunity to point out that the only reason User:Mantanmoreland isn't an admin now is because a guy going by the name "Wordbomb," along with his (apparently) massive army of sock puppets, made a convincing case that Mantanmoreland was, in fact, Gary Weiss - a Jewish blogger and author from New York who's one of the leading proponents of "naked short selling" in the stock market.

This user continues to assert that he studies "or has studied" at a Jesuit school, says he's "an MBA candidate at a large Eastern university," and continues to make this claim on his user page:

I am a "lapsed" Roman Catholic, but have an active interest in other religions and was, at one time, actively interested in reviving my Jewish heritage. I am of partially Jewish descent, and am proud of it.

Why does he make this claim? Many of us here believe we've established that he does it to support his personal POV-pushing campaign against Martin_Luther, ensuring that WP continues to highlight Luther's alleged anti-semitism as if he was the very progenitor of the Nazis, all so that he'll have the continued support of User:SlimVirgin and the rest of the "cabal" in protecting his own personally-owned biography!

And just how brazen is this guy? You'd think that under these circumstances he'd want to lay low for a while, but nooooo - just take a look at this diff from Jimbo's talk page - it's like Weiss is laughing in hysterics at the rest of Wikipedia, doing stuff that's much worse than what Essjay ever did (Essjay never, to my knowledge, used his position to bash leading figures of anyone else's religion).

He's been at it for a year now, and nobody stops him. But it's exactly the same thing - only worse! The only difference between this guy and Ryan Jordan is that Weiss isn't as nice a guy, and hasn't been hired by Wikia recently.

[gomi]

SlimeVirgin and her pet poodle Jayjg come out of L'affaire Essjay more powerful than before. Don't look for Gary Weiss/Mantanmoreland, Cbertlet/Chip Berlet, or her other toadies to go away soon.

This post has been edited by gomi: Mon 5th March 2007, 7:00am

[Dudley]

SlimeVirgin and her pet poodle Jayjg come out of L'affaire Essjay more powerful than before. Don't look for Gary Weiss/Mantanmoreland, Cbertlet/Chip Berlet, or her other toadies to go away soon.

I just wanted to point out that the Weiss=Mantanmoreland equation is anything but a given, in my opinion is 100% bogus, and also that it is the line that is being pushed in a sophisticated, well-funded corporate smear campaign being pursued by an company called Overstock.com.

There is more discussion on this ad nauseum in http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=7175

[Somey]

I just wanted to point out that the Weiss=Mantanmoreland equation is anything but a given, in my opinion is 100% bogus, and also that it is the line that is being pushed in a sophisticated, well-funded corporate smear campaign...

That's much better! We'll make a proper forum member of you yet!

[Joseph100]

"...SlimeVirgin and her pet poodle Jayjg come out of L'affaire Essjay more powerful than before. Don't look for Gary Weiss/Mantanmoreland, Cbertlet/Chip Berlet, or her other toadies to go away soon...."

This fact above is the reason why more stinking Turd, like Essjay, have to be dug out of the cesspool of Wikipedia and thrown onto the sidewalk in the bright sunlight of day for all the world to see and to know what Wikipedia is all about.

The Bluewater Internet must be shown the lies and hypocrisy and distortions as well as the pain and suffering its "encyclopedic biographies" do to real people.

The wonks ( administrators and the like) need to realize that Wikipedia is not a sovereign country which there are consequences for illegal and/or immoral behaviors.

I would like to thank those responsible for digging out a real big hunk of a bull crap, like Essjay, and dumping it on the sidewalk for all to see what kind person Wikipedia holds up on a pedestal.

It sure would be most gratifying if some of these Nastier Turds, in that Orwellian cesspool, like Gamaliel, Jayjg, or JzG could be discredited and shown the kind of despicable human beings they are.

Thank you.

This post has been edited by Joseph100: Thu 8th March 2007, 9:44pm

[Kathryn Cramer]

So what is an obsessed 24-year old Wikipedia addict going to do now?

Create a sockpuppet and grow it using yet another bogus set of credentials (albeit not so overreaching) until it too has a position of authority ...

It's ok to be cynical now right?

What makes you think he doesn't have 7 or 8 of them already incubating in the vats?

(You have a lot to learn about being cynical ...)

Jonny

Thing to do if you are an outed con-artist: Get cybersex on ten different dating sites under twenty different names. Apply for grants. Invent more personae. Liberate money from churches. File law suits against your accuser using lawyers you never pay. Live on someone else's credit card. Found a charity. Get a dog with a medical probelm and then go on the Internet to raise money for his medical bills. Our Boy has a rich, full life ahead of him and only limited ideas of how to solve his problems, apparently.

[Jonny Cache]

So what is an obsessed 24-year old Wikipedia addict going to do now?

Create a sockpuppet and grow it using yet another bogus set of credentials (albeit not so overreaching) until it too has a position of authority ...

It's ok to be cynical now right?

What makes you think he doesn't have 7 or 8 of them already incubating in the vats?

(You have a lot to learn about being cynical ...)

Jonny

Thing to do if you are an outed con-artist: Get cybersex on ten different dating sites under twenty different names. Apply for grants. Invent more personae. Liberate money from churches. File law suits against your accuser using lawyers you never pay. Live on someone else's credit card. Found a charity. Get a dog with a medical probelm and then go on the Internet to raise money for his medical bills. Our Boy has a rich, full life ahead of him and only limited ideas of how to solve his problems, apparently.

¤ Sigh ¤ — when will they ever learn ...

The thing is, we still don't know anything about the presumptive person in question — real name, age, sex, grants granted, lawsuits pending, cat or dog owner, etc. — except various statements that have come out of the horse's mouth or some other Wikipedia orficial like Jimbo Wales, not exactly multiple, independent, reliable soures. They even exploited that lack of knowledge as one of the reasons to change the article Ryan Jordan (Wikipedia) to Essjay scandal and then downgrade it to Essjay controversy, and that was just the last time I looked. We all know that they will put up an AFD in a fortnight of so, and eventually bury a token abstract of the whole sad business in some Out Of Our Way article or meta page like WP:OOPS.

Really, I'm thinking of starting a workshop on Cynicism 101 — oh wait — that's kind of what Wikipedia already is.

Nevermind ...

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Thu 8th March 2007, 2:42pm

[blissyu2]

All I can say is well done Daniel Brandt. This is clearly something serious and important and good that Daniel Brandt has done, using (at least partially) the outlet of Wikipedia Review, and he deserves a thorough pat on the back for this, as does everyone who has helped through their posting on this thread. This has now been recognised in the media, and has forced Jimbo to fire him.

Yet, sadly, Wikipedia continues to ban people like Daniel Brandt for doing the right thing, while encouraging lying, manipulative people to distort articles and provide untruths, like Essjay has been proven to have done.

It reflects on Wikipedia as a whole that they have, in effect, backed the wrong side.

[Nathan]

I agree. Excellent work. I couldn't have said it better myself.

[Yanksox]

All I can say is well done Daniel Brandt. This is clearly something serious and important and good that Daniel Brandt has done, using (at least partially) the outlet of Wikipedia Review, and he deserves a thorough pat on the back for this, as does everyone who has helped through their posting on this thread. This has now been recognised in the media, and has forced Jimbo to fire him.

Yet, sadly, Wikipedia continues to ban people like Daniel Brandt for doing the right thing, while encouraging lying, manipulative people to distort articles and provide untruths, like Essjay has been proven to have done.

It reflects on Wikipedia as a whole that they have, in effect, backed the wrong side.

I will say, that I was shocked with the national attention that this got. In a perfect world, it wouldn't get any because it's just a plain old website. The only issue is that alot of people fall into the trap of thinking that it is human knowledge when it is just what some people think human knowledge is.

Wikipedia needs something to keep it honest and no allow itself to be run by someone living out a fantasy by pulling the ploy of possessing tow PhDs. Daniel Brandt is a man that can hold anything accountable.

This post has been edited by Yanksox: Fri 9th March 2007, 5:36am

[blissyu2]

I only just now read this entire thread. Such a pity that I was without internet access (or a computer mostly) from July 2006 - July 2007, or thereabouts (I made the above post from an internet cafe, which I visited for 1 hour per month over that time). I am a little sad that I missed this entire thread while it was "happening".

And the thing is that this thread was an example of the real benefits of what Wikipedia Review can do. This thread was started in July 2006, yet the scandal "broke" in March 2007. We tried to expose things, and tried more, and then eventually got there. And still it wasn't in the media. We kept trying and trying until finally someone got it.

Now, sure, Wikipedia Review gets it wrong sometimes. Sometimes in our fishing expeditions we get it wrong. I for one wouldn't have approved of going after Essjay of all people, who was a member of Wikipedia Review and most of us thought was a pretty darn nice person (with the possible exception of his actions with regards to Amorrow, where he refused to give us details as to what his crime was, and then turned around and blamed us for "harbouring" him). But the thing is that we do often get it right. We got it right with various things later exposed by the Wikiscanner. We got it right with this. We got it right with SlimVirgin. We got it right with lots of different things.

It is good to get some recognition for this achievement. It is sad that Wikipedia still regards us an attack site in spite of this, and refuses to recognise this valuable research.

[Jonny Cache]

It is sad that Wikipedia still regards us an attack site in spite of this, and refuses to recognise this valuable research.

Get a clue, Bliss, the way that Wikipedia recognis/zes the Review's valuable research is by labeling it a WP:BADSITE.

Sic Simper Wikipedia —

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Mon 24th September 2007, 4:49pm

[Piperdown]

It is sad that Wikipedia still regards us an attack site in spite of this, and refuses to recognise this valuable research.

Get a clue, Bliss, the way that Wikipedia recognis/zes the Review's valuable research is by labeling it a WP:BADSITE.

Sic Simper Wikipedia —

Jonny

It's been 6 months, right? Any bets on who Mr Jordan is now in the wikimasquerade?