Nom de guerre
Big news in Wikipedia-land today. One of the main editors has out’ed himself as a fraud.
To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.
The New Yorker had to issue an Editor’s Note for a story they ran last year. Wikipedia has become a major source of information on the Internet. The site regularly comes up in the first handful of results on Google searches. We already know that the facts on the pages are liable to all kinds of twisting. But now we can’t even trust those tasked with editing?