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March 07, 2007
The Good the Bad and the Wiki-maiden?
With Apologies to Clint Eastwood Eli Wallach & Lee Van Cleef
With Wikipedia we've mentioned the good:
Wikipedia has its faults, but apparently lack of guts or honor is not among them.
And the Bad:
...we linked to an interesting debate betweeen Wikipedia and Britannica Online over which is better. I figured that both have their uses but at least with Britannica you don't have to worry about uploaded virus:
Now this BBC story (via Michelle) gives us the Ugly. A Wikipedia editor who was in fact a wiki-maiden:
But he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies. He has now retired from the site....
Under the name Essjay, Mr Jordan edited articles and also had the authority to arbitrate disputes between authors and remove site vandalism.
To their credit you can also find an article on the story...at Wikipedia:
Essjay had described himself on his user profile as "a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States."[3] According to the note, he now said he was Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old community college dropout from Kentucky and that he had relied on sources such as Catholicism for Dummies when editing articles
The review of edits being made is only proper, but this highlights the greatest weakness of Wikipedia, Digg and other sites that rely of the honor of their users for stories and ranking; The honor system requires honorable people.
Posted by Peter at March 7, 2007 09:29 AM