From: THES Daily news Tuesday 6 March 2007
Wikipedia hit by identity crisis as student admits posing as professor
Wikipedia is facing one of its biggest crises after a twentysomething student from Kentucky posed as a professor of religious studies and made more than 20,000 alterations to controversial topics on the online encyclopedia. Using the pseudonym "Essjay", the bogus professor had become one of Wikipedia's most prolific "editors", trusted to adjudicate on factual disputes and keep the site free from vandalism. He had even featured in an article in the New Yorker, which took his claims to be an expert in canon law at face value. Now he has been unmasked as Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old who had created an entirely false identity, claiming to be a tenured professor at a private university, but who relied on books such as Catholicism for Dummies when correcting articles on dogma.
The Independent
