jumpy jumpy vitamins

So most of you have probably seen or heard mention of Wikipedia in the press lately.

First, the Essjay incident: a Wikipedian rose to prominence, getting himself loads of responsibilities including administrator, bureaucrat, checkuser, and oversight rights and a spot on the Arbitration Committee. All of this was done while said Wikipedian was pseudonymous.

The problem, of course, wasn’t his pseudonymity. That’s common and rather well-entrenched on public Web sites. The problem was that Essjay was falsifying his credentials, using them to win arguments and convince legit academics to help Wikipedia, and telling reporters that they were true. The pseudonymity exacerbated the problem because it removed the ability to verify his Ph.D claims, but many people are able to contribute pseudonymously without resorting to outright fraud.

Essjay resigned all his positions of trust and quit the project last week. Frankly, I think he did the right thing in resigning, but the more-right thing would have been to come clean earlier, and the even-more-right thing would have been to tell the truth from the beginning. Of course, it is too late to do anything about that now, so we just get to deal.

In the aftermath, we’re seeing proposals from Jimbo to introduce credential verification. I don’t know that this is such a good idea.

1. The existence of legitimate credentials does not necessarily correlate to skill in contributing to Wikipedia; it is entirely possible (and actually somewhat common) for high schoolers to write better encyclopedia articles than the acknowledged experts in a given field (cf. many articles on British royalty, done by a then-15-year-old from New Jersey).
2. Credentials can be used as leverage in arguments — “I have several advanced degrees in $FOO so you just need to listen” — to obliterate all further discussion at the cost of true consensus.
3. The proposal assumes that all credentials are equal, even though real-world experience dictates that some programs are more rigorous than others.
4. Many areas of expertise have no clear credentials. Who exactly has a doctorate in Pokémon?
5. And the biggest issue IMHO: How exactly is the Wikimedia Foundation going to manage the logistics? If this is implemented on the English Wikipedia — a project that has nearly 1.7M articles on every topic imaginable and nearly 3.8M registered users (never mind unregistered contributors) who hail from every corner of the globe — then will WMF staff have time to do anything besides credential verification?

Last bit on Essjay: is it just me, or was ABC’s coverage of this rather slapdash? Most of the footage was recycled from 20/20′s coverage of Wikimania last summer; the report made very little mention of the Essjay incident; and, uh, who says professors of religion can’t edit articles on Justin Timberlake and Star Wars?

(Yes, that’s me in the blue shirt fidgeting in the chair. The reporter was interviewing me through a cell phone on a couple boxes next to my right knee, but I had to maintain eye contact with the sound guy seated across from my left knee. It was an odd experience, to say the least…)

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