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« Electricity supply and demand | Main | Boston bomb squad still at it... » Wednesday, February 28, 2007Wiki-democracyThe New Yorker has a rare Editors' Note in this week's issue, concerning Stacy Schiff's article of seven months ago (!) about Wikipedia. The New Yorker, which employs 16 full-time fact-checkers, prints very few corrections, let alone the more grave-sounding Editors' Notes. (I have come to believe, however, that it is not therefore to be inferred that the magazine is otherwise error-free; their threshold for printing a correction is clearly much higher than the Times's, where a misspelling merits a correction.) The Editors' Note, the bulk of which is reprinted here on the Freakonomics blog, explains that one of Schiff's principal sources for the piece, a man who goes by the username Essjay in his role as an administrator of the site, which offers the option of anonymity, represented himself fraudulently. Schiff described him as "a tenured professor of religion at a private university," whereas he now says that he is Ryan Jordan, who "is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and ... has never taught." A bit of pie in the face for The New Yorker, but not fascinating. More intriguing, however, is Wikipedia founding guru Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales's reaction to this imposture, also included in the note: "Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay's invented persona, 'I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.'" Huh. It would have been so easy for Wales to publicly reprimand his administrator, but instead he weighed in in mild defense of fraudulent anonymity. Perhaps this presages a split among the world's creators and reporters of knowledge. The New Yorker, if nothing else, stands for a model of elitism and meritocracy whereby only the best need apply. Wikipedia greets everyone and gives them all de facto and de jure equality. Who will win out in the Internet age? The bloggers vs. the journalistic mainstream, the wiki-guys vs the Enyclopedia-guys, the personae we meet in bars or those concocted online? Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:36 PM
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