So, I sat down and read the entire New Yorker article about Wikipedia, including the editor's note about Essjay, i.e., Ryan Jordan, the man-child who falsified his resume and was praised for it by Jimmy Wales. In the aftermath, The New York Times wrote about the whole thing, which wound up embarrassing Wales and Wikipedia enough to cut Jordan loose.

So far, so good, but then I noticed something in the NYT piece. An administrator identified as WJBscribe is quoted rising to the young liar's defense thusly:

Just wanted to express my 100 percent support for everything you do around here. I think you were totally entitled to protect your identity. Don't let all the fuss get you down!"

Folks, this is the same WJBscribe who has intervened to censor verified, public-record information from the Matt Sanchez article that I discussed previously in the Articles section of this site. He has also banned me from Wikipedia. I guess it's par for the course, but then maybe it's par for the course on this website is to point out that Wikipedia has an active administrator who removes facts and defends fabricators.

No wonder the thing is going down in flames. I don't know if anyone saw the latest Colbert segment on Wikipedia broadcast on August 22, but I'd say Wikipedia is rapidly turning into the punch line of a joke. It's their own fault. Last spring, they got a clear warning to turn things around, but their arrogance and irresponsibility prevented them from doing anything. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

Timing and context are important here. For a couple of weeks after he was hired at Wikia it was known that he had faked his bio but not yet realized that he had used his fake credentials to influence article content or sent that letter claiming to be a professor. I think you will find a lot of people who supported Essjay when all that was known was that he had faked out Daniel Brandt, who stopped supporting him after the revelation of the content dispute abuse.

"Timing and context are important here"?

No, not here. WJBscribe expressed his support after Ryan Jordan's fraud had been exposed. WJBscribe is still an administrator at Wikipedia, and he has used his power to keep verified, public-record fact out of an article. That's corruption, plain and simple. I realize this might be too much blunt truth for Wikipedians and their defenders who have a tangential relationship with the truth, but so be it.

Yes, but this is the same WJBscribe who banned Malber.

He can't be all bad.

This is not a question of someone being "all bad." It's a question of a Wikipedia insider having rallied in defense of a resume-falsifier. If WJBscribe had done so prior to knowing all the facts, then he's guilty of very bad judgment and should have resigned his administratorship.

But it goes beyond that: WJBscribe defended Ryan Jordan after the facts were known, just as Jimmy Wales did. Either of them might do other good things, but I'd argue that they've showed their stripes. In WJBscribe's case, his actions with regard to the Sanchez article show that he's still quite comfortable with falsification. That's "bad," if you will. It shows that the insiders at Wikipedia still have no concept of what is true, and what is not.

Well, I think you'll find that a lot of people on Wikipedia Review liked Essjay. He was one of the nicest Wikipedia Administrators that we ever had come in here, and he was here during a time when we had some really nasty people. And I mean it is true that he refused to tell us about Amorrow, so we were a bit upset with him, and he added WR to the spam blacklist, but at least he was nice about it, and it seemed like a genuine mistake, and like he would get in trouble if he said the real reason why they thought that Amorrow was a stalker.

And I mean in a lot of ways, who cares if he lied about his credentials? The issue is whether he used that to influence things. Did he? I haven't seen any real evidence that he did. He also wasn't editing articles of historical importance, not highly controversial articles or historical articles, or anything like that. It was important as a technicality, and it highlights a general abuse, and indeed he needed to go down to prove the point. But at the same time I do feel quite sorry for him.

I think that he probably just started off wishing he had it. Its kind of like if I tell you that I have a PhD in Maths. I mean I would have if things had gone right in my life. I certainly feel like I deserved to have that qualification, but circumstances out of my control meant that I didn't get it. Perhaps that is the same situation with Essjay. It sounds like he did a pretty good job of faking it, so perhaps it was. I am sure that I could convince people that I had a PhD in Maths, in terms of my knowledge.

So just because WJBscribe supported him I don't think makes him a bad person.

That's irrelevant. Con men are often "nice." In fact, being "nice" is often why con men do so well.


That's something you'll have to ponder. You've just made an argument for lying, and lying is part and parcel of the critical flaw at the very center of Wikipedia. blissyu2, facts are facts, no matter how inconvenient.


The truth is a "technicality?" No! Sorry, but when you put yourself in the encyclopedia business you'd better have an iron-clad commitment to fact and truth, or you don't belong there. Feeling sorry for him is irrelevant. Now, I suppose this is a difference of personal attitudes, but I don't feel sorry for a liar in a senior position at an enterprise that depends upon telling the truth.


If you tell people you have a Ph.D. in Maths and you don't, that would make you a liar. And you'd be a liar regardless of your justifications for lying. I might otherwise find you pleasant and maybe even sympathize with you, but all that would do is make you a liar who I like. Yes, I'm being harsh, but the truth can be a tough taskmaster. Liars should stay out of the truth business.

Ryan Jordan -- let's use his real name, seeing as how we know what it is -- is a liar. Wikipedia's insiders defended him, knowing that he was a liar. This compounded the issue. There will be cheats and liars in any enterprise, but when those who run the enterprise tolerate them and support them, then it is not only fair but indeed necessary to be even harsher on them than on the liar himself.


This isn't about whether WJBscribe is a "bad person." I'm not qualified to make such a judgment. I can, however, state with confidence that WJBscribe supported a liar, knowing that he was a liar, and that WJBscribe has deleted facts from the article I've cited. The people and dogs around him might "like" him, and he may well be kind to strangers and the poor, and if I met him I might like him. None of that matters. Truth is truth, and ethics are ethics. The rules apply equally to the likeable and the unlikeable.

It occurs to me that this is a significant issue at Wikipedia: Its insiders decide who they "like," and then give those they "like" positions of authority on that basis. At a practical level, that may well be why Wikipedia has run itself off the rails. To recall the old proverb, paraphrased, it's not your enemies who'll do the most harm, it's your friends. Think about it!

Yes, well, perhaps a more pertinent point to make is this: what harm did he cause to Wikipedia? I mean in terms of what articles did he hurt? What people did he hurt? Obviously the media storm caused harm, but that's a separate issue really.

Wow, you simply don't want to grasp the issue, do you? What you call a "media storm" isn't what's at issue here. Ryan Jordan is a liar. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, or at least it purports to be one. Wikipedia's insiders, right up to and including this WJBscribe character and Jimmy Wales, supported a liar, knowing that he was a liar.

What harm, you ask? Here's your answer: By lying, Jordan undermined the reputation of Wikipedia, which is essential to its ability to thrive. By tolerating, protecting, and supporting a liar, WJBscribe and Jimmy Wales have virtually destroyed Wikipedia's credibility. In a way, I'm happy to see that it's worked out this way, because it's shined a light on the ethical vacuum right in the center of that organization. It was only a matter of time until the corporate and CIA editing emerged. More will come out, I'm sure: you rarely find just one or two cockroaches. I'd rather know than not know.

What harm? What about all the people who have contributed true material to Wikipedia? Their contributions are now under a cloud. Because of Jordan and especially the leaders at Wikipedia, anything on that site is now under suspicion. If I had edited a couple hundred articles there, I'd be feeling pretty goddamned "hurt" to know that Wikipedia's managers pissed all over everything I and thousands of other people had done for them.

The bottom line is this: At Wikipedia, fact and truth don't matter. They are regarded as items to be negotiated. An organization that regards truth as negotiable cannot be trusted, especially when it's in the information business.

By the way, let me tell you something else. As someone who was in the media business and then a different career, and who hired people, I'd never hire Ryan Jordan for any job. I wouldn't let him wash my car, let alone put him in a position of responsibility. I might like him, but I would never, ever trust him. That's a big burden for a 20-something to carry around forever, but it's something he should have thought about before falsifying his resume and allowing his lies to be dissseminated without correction in The New Yorker. A career in pre-owned automobile sales awaits Mr. Jordan, and I have some advice: Ryan, don't lie to your sales manager. You'll be out in a heartbeat.

What's worse, though, is Jimmy Wales's attitude. He's 39 years old, and has been around the track. Someone who'd go to bat for a liar, knowing that he was one, is worse than the liar himself. Jimmy Wales is unfit for a leadership position in any organization. Wikipedia's ongoing collapse can be directly traced to the vaccum at the top. The user-edited encyclopedia is an interesting idea, but Jimmy Wales shouldn't be allowed within 100 miles of it. The Ryan Jordan issue isn't some little dustup. It's the whole shootin' match, wrapped up in a nice, neat, stinking little package.

I don't have the time or inclination to find the posts, but it was well-established that he used his false credentials in deletion discussions, as well as posed as the professor character in "official" e-mails concerning Wikipedia situations. I put "official" in quotes not as his working for Wikimedia, but as working on Wikipedia.

Beyond that, even if he didn't explicitly use his "credentials" in terms of content, the simple fact that, anti-expert or not, people tend to defer to those who demonstrate higher levels of education is reason enough to consider the "harm" he did. Had I the tools and energy at the time, I would have seriously considered reverting all of his articlespace changes based on that alone - that he likely conned people into inherently trusting his "knowledge" based on his alleged stature.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the anti-expert model - I think most agree that it works in various forms, even if there's a vocal contingent who believe otherwise here. The problem is that you still have inherent trusts and biases, and those inherent trusts and biases make figuring out the true harm of what Jordan did uncalculable. Hell, I rarely interacted with him and would have likely deferred to him on the few issues I can think of, or at least failed to question him. Multiply that by the thousands, and you start to get the scope.

WJScribe only blocked Malber temporarily. Sean William blocked Malber indef on EN and Malber had a long block log--odd that Sean William didn't do a Ryulong style block of blocking with email disabled for no reason.

White Cat did all the blocking and then final permablock on commons. White Cat has along userpage with lots of interests that are boring and vague, but at the top is a big quote from Zeratul in Starcraft so I paint White Cat as a large StarCraft fan and that's that and I hope that image sticks.

Malber is not banned. Blueboy tried but Cbrown1023 and Majorly reverted.


Essjay I don't think was that bad except for lying about his identity. WJScribe as an admin well he just likes to block people pretty much and that's how he has a fun day.

Yes, see [[User:Essjay/Letter]].

Yup, right down the memory hole. That must mean it never happened.

Although Essjay had a fake bio and all...

Was he really that harmful to Wikipedia or mean to people? Or was the fake bio his single black mark?

There were a few minor things. Things that I am aware of:

1) He added Wikipedia Review to the spam blacklist for "circumventing the ban on Amorrow's site doubleblue.info" - although he did at least remove it later after we deleted the link.
2) He stated that Amorrow was banned from Wikipedia for stalking but REFUSED TO PROVIDE ANY EVIDENCE, expecting us to trust him! He then, after stating it but refusing to provide evidence, told everyone on Wikipedia that we were supporting a stalker. Even after we then banned Amorrow, he refused to take that back or to correct anyone.
3) At one point he protected my user talk page for "unblock abuse", when I had asked to be unblocked, a legitimate request. Either he was completely stupid, or else he was severely abusing his power.

He may have done more, I don't know. We didn't really focus on him here, as we didn't consider him to be abusive. He was generally very helpful to us. I am not aware of any other black marks against his name, besides lying about his credentials.

See posts #7 and #9 in this thread.

That's unforgivable in my eyes.

Can you please just speak for yourself here? I consider him to have been abusive, and it is evident that others here feel the same way.

Hmmm Essjay did block you.

It wasn't the main blocks I see for 3RR on: Ashlee Simpson, Pieces of Me, The Ashlee Simpson Show

Essjay blocked you for some ArbCom thing. However Essjay did reverse the block early and most admins are so stubborn in their blocking that they'll never unblock people they block and ones like Ryulong will even wheel war if someone else unblocks.

This is par for the course. Look at how Jayg and his Snippies have kept verified, public-record facts out of the various Circumcision articles and terrorized anyone stupid enough to oppose them. It's not news when a Wikipedia admin proves to be corrupt; it's news when even one proves to be honest and yet survives.

Al

I've seen one thing Jayjg has done for years is to just go and fish in checkuser and then claim everyone on the same ISP are all socks and ban them.

Fuck Wikipedia

I couldn't have said it better.

Many people, for reasons of privacy and common sense, put aside their real-world credentials and instead argue on the basis of evidence that they can easily dig up due to the knowledge that earned them those credentials. It's a harder path, but if you want to argue from evidence, not authority, this is the way to go. It's not so much anti-expert as it is an acknowledgement that expertise is more important than experthood.

Now, I'm not against those who admit to their credentials, so long as they still argue from the evidence, instead of expecting us to trust them just because they really ought to know. The "just trust me" approach disturbs me because, in fact, people can be trusted least when they know their claims can't be checked. What gives the opinions of academics weight in the real world is that we can be sure that other academics are keeping them honest, but no such checks and balances exist here.

It would be bad enough that Jordan took that approach, but the fact that the credentials themselves were fake just underscores what's wrong with it. The truth is that experts can be biased, incompetent or simply mistaken, and that's assuming they're not simply frauds. Just as Jordan was star-struck by Jimbo, too many editors are equally befuddled by claims of advanced degrees or even by the raw power of the sysop bit, which people seem to assume grants admins super-human judgement.

It's not just Jordan, either. Recently, Proabivouac took advantage of the open secret that he is the sock puppet of linguist Timothy Usher to, ironically, get some people thrown off as sock puppets. He claimed to match new users to banned ones with certainty based on similarities in their writing style. Of course, that's not how linguistics works. It's based on analyzing large bodies of text written by groups of people to find relationships (not identity) between dialects, tracing the origins of words and other changes in language. Applying it forensically is, at the very least, dubious.

As it happens, I know for a fact that, in at least one case and probably others, Proabivouac was wrong or just plain lied. In doing so, his methodology for proving identity was obviously flawed and would have been ripped to shreds in any environment where academic rigor is enforced by peer review. SOPHIA, whose background in physics gives her a solid grasp of statistics and the scientific method, tore this moron a new asshole in her analysis, but that's being soundly ignored so far as I can tell. Note that she didn't just wave her degrees around and say that was reason enough to trust her, she showed all her work and defended her methodology without appealing to authority.

Whether Proabivoac is merely overwhelmed by his own hubris or knows he's blowing smoke up people's asses is an open question, and I welcome his answer here. Regardless of the basis of his false accusations, real people are being hurt. Add to this the hypocrisy of a sock puppet pretending to out others for sock puppetry and you get... well, business as usual at Wikipedia.

To which I say: Fuck Wikipedia and anyone who supports it.

Al

"I've analyized their writing style" is a common lie on wikipedia. Most people believe that lie, unfortunately.

Heh. That's beautiful. One of the best posts I've seen for ages. It'd be great if it was backed up with a link though. Can anyone find a link to an example of this kind of thing?

Perhaps Ruylong banning an entire ISP in India with 1000s of users just because he thought that it might be used by one user who he didn't like.

I've been thinking more and more that the whole idea of hunting for sock puppets with checkuser is inherently flawed. It's not just a recipe for a witch hunt, it's ultimately doomed to failure and false positives.

One of the themes I've encountered is that WP is a MMORPG. While there's certainly much humor and some truth to this, there's also the kernal of some good ideas. In an RPG, you level up over time, gaining benefits. If WP accounts gained power with a growing track record of positive contributions, there'd be little incentive to puppetry.

The problem is that it requires admins who aren't incompetent or corrupt, which is a fatal flaw on WP. It also requires that WP give up on the pseudo-democracy nonsense that makes puppet-voting so appealing. These are really two sides to the same coin: we need content dispute resolution that's not conducive to mob rule.

Al



It's one of those things where every two-bit idiot with a sysop bit (hi, SV!) thinks they're an expert, and even the supposed experts (hi, Pro!) are fucking incompetent. It amounts to a claim of witchcraft.

See my recent post for why the whole puppet thing is fucking retarded.

Al