Back in July 2006, The New Yorker published an article by Pulitzer-prize winning biographer Stacy Schiff called Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise. According to the piece:

One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he contributed to articles in his field—on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends.

The NYT takes up the story:

After the article appeared, a reader contacted The New Yorker about Essjay’s real identity, which Mr. Jordan had disclosed with little fanfare when he recently accepted a job at Wikia, a for-profit company.

In an e-mail message on Friday, The New Yorker’s deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, said: “We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia’s confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him. In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay’s identity beyond what he told us.”

The New Yorker editors’ note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the site’s growth. “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it,” he said of Mr. Jordan’s alter ego.

Well Mr Wales – Jimbo to Wikipedians – has changed his tune, and Ryan Jordan has ‘retired‘ from the tricky Wiki stuff. His farewell?

I have received an astounding amount of support, especially by email, but it’s time to go. I tried to walk away in August, and managed to do so for quite a while, but I eventually came back, because of the many requests I received urging me to return. Many of you have written to ask me to not leave, to not give up what I have here, but I’m afraid it’s time to make a clean break.

So what does this say about Wikipedia? Here’s Jason Scott:

Think about it: in just a couple of years, Essjay had acquired every major position in Wikipedia’s class structure, every secret power you can get on there: the ability to lock out users, the ability to “disappear” articles, the ability to decide the fate of others in arbitration, the ability to protect articles from being suddenly changed or modified by the “wrong” folks. He’d even gotten a paying job from the for-pay version of Wikipedia! Way to go, charlatan doucheface!

Wikipedia considers the ability of anonymous or un-backed-up users to be a feature. A few of us consider it a tad of a bug. Here’s a case where it showed how much that bug can be exploited for personal gain, and how many people, even when faced with total, utter, obvious evidence that they were bamboozled will say “But he was such a good editor. He did so much work. I’m going to miss him….”

And where does it leave The New Yorker? Here’s David Robinson from Freedom to Tinker, who last July argued that it was more trustworthy than the online encyclopaedia:

The New Yorker fell short of its own standards, and took EssJay at his word without verifying his identity or even learning his name. He had, as all con men do, a plausible-sounding story, related in this case to a putative fear of professional retribution that in hindsight sits rather uneasily with his claim that he had tenure. If the magazine hadn’t broken its own rules, this wouldn’t have gotten into print.

But that response would be too facile … Granted that perfect fact checking makes for a trustworthy story; how do you know when the fact checking is perfect and when it is not? You don’t. More generally, predictions are only as good as someone’s ability to figure out whether or not the conditions are right to trigger the predicted outcome.

So what about this case: On the one hand, incidents like this are rare and tend to lead the fact checkers to redouble their meticulousness. On the other, the fact claims in a story that are hardest to check are often for the same reason the likeliest ones to be false. Should you trust the sometimes-imperfect fact checking that actually goes on?

My answer is yes. In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.

Nicholas Carr has a nice up-sum:

Marshall Poe, who wrote a long and rather starry-eyed article on Wikipedia for the Atlantic last year, suggested in an interview that the Wikipedia phenomenon has its roots in the craze, during the 70s and 80s, for the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons. “Wales and all of these guys were involved in that stuff,” Poe said. “They loved playing those games.” In Dungeons & Dragons, he continued,

you took on a new identity, you inhabited a different world, you could act in ways you’d never acted before, ways that weren’t consistent with your real-life community but were consistent with that new world. It was really very liberating, a vessel for your imagination and also for your intelligence. Because a “world” had to be consistent. That was one of the rules. You couldn’t just do anything. So it could become very Byzantine, very complex.

In the byzantine world of Wikipedia, with its arcane language, titles, and rules and its multitude of clans, Essjay wore the robes of a wizard. He was allowed to stand beside – and to serve – Jimbo the White. Together, they would bring “knowledge” to the unenlightened masses. But then the Wizard Essjay tried to slip through the gates of the real. Now the game is up.

But it’s a little too flip. I like Wikipedia. And I have a real MA from the real Oxford University. Know what you have to do to get one of those? Just send a cheque…trust me.