<p>Contributor not the professor he claimed to be
Mary Vallis, National Post
Published: Thursday, March 08, 2007
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/33nqmb%5B/url%5D">http://tinyurl.com/33nqmb</a>
The anonymous user-driven encyclopedia Wikipedia is struggling to regain people's trust after one of its most trusted and prolific editors, who claimed to be a professor of religion, was exposed as a 24-year-old from Kentucky.</p>
<p>Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's cofounder, said yesterday contributors to the collaborative online service will be allowed to remain anonymous, but it will ask those claiming to have professional credentials to identify themselves. Mr. Wales appears to have changed his tune since he spoke with The New Yorker.</p>
<p>Last week, the magazine revealed in an editor's note that it had reported the false credentials of a Wikipedia administrator and contributor calling himself Essjay and claiming to be a tenured professor. Essjay and his comments appeared in a feature story published in July, 2006. The magazine later learned that Essjay was Ryan Jordan, a young man without any advanced degrees.</p>
<p>"I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it," Mr. Wales told The New Yorker last week.</p>
<p>Critics of Wikipedia have seized on the Essjay scandal as further proof that the participatory Web site, whose supporters claim to be as reliable as traditional encyclopedias, is not to be trusted.</p>