Mike Masnick debunks this silly Wikipedia “scandal”:
Stephen Dubner, over at the Freakonomics blog, is pointing out that The New Yorker has issued a correction to an article about Wikipedia from last summer. The article talked to one of Wikipedia’s site administrators and contributors, who goes by the name Essjay. The article claimed that Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university, who had a Ph.D. in theology. However, the correction notes that Essjay is really a 24-year-old who has no advanced degrees and has never taught. This is getting some attention from the usual Wikipedia haters, suggesting that this is somehow proof of the problems with Wikipedia. However, that seems incredibly backwards. It actually highlights the reverse. It shows the fallibility of The New Yorker — a publication known as one of the few media outlets that still does serious fact checking, but apparently was not able to verify the identity of this individual. If anything, this highlights the fact that the so-called “professionals” often make mistakes too. Also, while mistakes in Wikipedia are a lot more easily correctable, it’s a bit of a process to correct this kind of mistake in The New Yorker — which is why it’s now getting attention.
The whole point of the Wikipedia model is that it doesn’t rely on the credibility of any one contributor to get its facts right. If one contributor doesn’t do his homework or outright makes things up, there will be a hundred other users visiting the page, at least one of whom is likely to notice the error. So it’s downright bizarre to fault Wikipedia for failing to engage in the kind of fact-checking that it has always explicitly disclaimed doing.
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