Spontaneous Monotony

Well thanks to a misplaced blogstorm (spouted verbatim by the normally level headed BBC and New York Times) Wikipedia has lost one of its foremost contributors.

What exactly was Essjay’s ‘crime’? He didn’t delete hundreds of pages in defiance of Wikipedia policy and then respond abusively to those who objected (take a bow Kelly Martin) or suggest the inclusion of material that is arguably child porn on Wikipedia (the latter was more of a mailing list flamewar than the actiosn of one person). No, Essjay pretended to be a university professor.

Now, for those of you who have better things to do than spend a lot of your time editing Wikipedia, allow me to explain (to the wikignomes among you, indulge me). Wikipedia has never been about credentials. A person’s contributions to Wikipedia have always been judged on the quality of those contributions, not on the ‘credentials’ (or ‘stupid bits of paper’ if a commenter is in an uncharitable mood) that the person has.

The traditional method of analysing work – that someone is not listened to unless they have the necessary credentials – is simply not suitable for the wiki process, which has ‘you can edit this page, right the hell now’ as its guiding principle, and details already-determined facts. This is in contrast of people doing original research, and the scientific community determining ‘The Truth™’ based on other people doing their own studies and coming to the same conclusion. The traditional scientific process takes months, even years, to determine who is right and who is wrong. The wiki process does the same (albeit in relation to already-known facts) in the process of seconds – there are even ‘automated revert‘ javascripts you can install onto your Wikipedia profile.

That is what makes what has happened to Essjay all the more ridiculous. To be fair to Jimbo Wales, he did his best, initially sticking up for Essjay’s right to protect himself from identity theft by not giving out an accurate lifestory on a wiki page, but once the so-called ‘mainstream’ media halfwits stuck their oar in, there wasn’t much Jimbo could do.

Sure, there is evidence (and I use that in the layman’s sense of the word, given that we are talking about wiki talkpage histories here) that some people deferred to Essjay’s supposed ‘expertise’ in content discussions. Such people have forgotten that basic ‘what you write matters’ rule, and could benefit Wikipedia greatly by sodding off to Citizendium or some other elitist enclave.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 10:34 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.