Wikipedia Administrator EssJay claims he’s a tenured professor of theology when he’s really a 24-year old with no teaching experience. Wales says, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”
Apparently this report sparked a controversy, and it becomes apparent from the comments about this article on Digg, people are outraged that Wales dare defend such a scumbag of a liar. Well, I beg to differ.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with someone pretending to have false credentials on Wikipedia. It doesn’t have any *real* bearing on the *actual* validity of the content on Wikipedia. To put it simply, Wikipedia is defined by its thousands of contributors and users. As with any fact, its validity is based on the number of people who subscribe to the information that it embodies. That is the meaning of “credentials”. Someone is considered to have credentials if a University or some other authoritative body, such as the Internet community, endorses this person as credible.
With millions on Wikipedia, the site as a whole has credentials, simply because millions of people believe the information that it presents to be true (regardless of whether or not that corresponds to reality).
HOWEVER, Wikipedia is indeed an equilibrium of information; if some information is introduced that doesn’t correspond closely to reality, according to the millions of users, it is eventually deleted. This ONE GUY, out of MILLIONS, *cannot* tip the balance of this equilibrium, even if what he wrote in his Wikipedia articles is patent nonsense. But that’s not even the issue here! The issue, apparently, is that the information he writes about HIMSELF is patent nonsense. User pages are not part of the encyclopedia (in part for this very reason).
Please consider that Jim Wales lives and breathes Wikipedia; even though he’s a regular person and not a god, and you may disagree with his statements, as the creator of Wikipedia he ought to have at least the same credibility as Wikipedia itself. Whether his statement is productive or not is another matter entirely. Again, this doesn’t have any bearing of the *actual* validity of Wikipedia content either. Only the users do. IMHO
