John Lott's Website

Yet, more problems with Wikipedia

This is not particularly surprising:

In a blink, the wisdom of the crowd became the fury of the crowd. In the last few days, contributors to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, have turned against one of their own who was found to have created an elaborate false identity.

Under the name Essjay, the contributor edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people with the authority to deal with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors.

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.

Mr. Jordan contended that he resorted to a fictional persona to protect himself from bad actors who might be angered by his administrative role at Wikipedia. (He did not respond to an e-mail message, nor to messages conveyed by the Wikipedia office.)

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process — all editing of entries is marked and saved — allows readers to react to suspected fraud. . . . .

Freerepublic has more information on Mr. Jordan:

This Essjay character is VERY typical of the Wikipedia administrator elite. The NYT has the basics, but they also leave out a lot about him.
Specifically - Essjay claimed to be a homosexual theologian and frequently espoused far left versions of Christianity in his article edits. He basically used his phony Ph.D. to browbeat his leftist point of view into articles on Christianity by citing himself as an expert.

He is also one of dozens of radical gays who CURRENTLY populate the upper tiers of wikipedia's administration. This guy is just the tip of the iceburg at Wikipedia.

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Some people are trying to set up an alternative to Wikipedia. Given the liberal bias of Wikipedia, they claim that "Wikipedia is "anti-American", "anti-Christian" and "anti-capitalism" according to US fundamentalist Christians who have set up their own online reference site, Conservapedia, to protect themselves from the evils of the world."

Labels: Wikipedia

Lots of Problems with Wikipedia

Profs question students' Wikipedia dependency.

Some problems with WIkipedia.

How Do You Cite Wikipedia on a History Paper? At Middlebury College, You Don't. (Subscription needed)

Wikiality and the media.

Labels: Research, Wikipedia

Problems with Wikipedia

A word to the wise:

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that can be altered by anyone with a computer, has proved remarkably useful for pulling political dirty tricks.

Political operatives are covertly rewriting -- or defacing -- candidates' biographical entries to make the boss look good or the opponent look ridiculous.

As a result, political campaigns are monitoring the Web site more closely than ever this election year.

Revisions made by Capitol Hill staffers became so frequent and disruptive earlier this year that Wikipedia temporarily blocked access to the site from some congressional Internet addresses. The pranks included bumping up the age of the Senate's oldest member, West Virginia's Robert C. Byrd, from 88 to 180, and giving crude names to other lawmakers.

The entry for Democratic Rep. Jim Marshall of Georgia labeled him "too liberal" for his state, in part because of a contribution he received from a political action committee run by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat. The man who doctored Mr. Marshall's biography now works for his Republican challenger.

In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary.

Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son's arrest last August in a drunken-driving accident that left his best friend dead.

The information was accurate and had been in the news, but Mr. Brilliant's boss, Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, declared the son's legal troubles out of bounds.

The link to Mr. Brilliant was discovered by Mr. Taylor's campaign, which immediately accused the Cox camp of engaging in "gutter politics" and demanded Mr. Brilliant's resignation.

Some 1,000 volunteer monitors scan changes to Wikipedia's entries to keep them free of obvious partisan editing, factual errors and profanity, said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. . . . .