New Yorker correction dogs arbitrator into departure
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Ryan Jordan, also known as Essjay and newly appointed as a member of the Arbitration Committee a week ago, has resigned his positions and announced his departure from Wikipedia. This comes after The New Yorker, which interviewed him as part of a feature on Wikipedia last July, corrected its description of the fake persona Jordan had given the magazine. Ironically, this is another side of the Internet's potential anonymity once highlighted by The New Yorker itself, in a famous cartoon captioned, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
For a long time, Jordan did not disclose his identity, but described himself as a "tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States" and said he had four academic degrees in that field. In the meantime, he was a very active Wikipedia editor and became an administrator, bureaucrat, mediator, and received access to the checkuser and oversight functions. The New Yorker article by Stacy Schiff mentioned Jordan having degrees in theology and canon law and also talked about how he "often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz."
Later revelations indicated that Jordan was 24 years old and living in Louisville, Kentucky. He had attended several colleges in the area, but did not possess the degrees he had claimed or teach at a university.
As an explanation for the fake persona, Jordan pointed to the problem of people trying to harass and stalk Wikipedia editors. This concern implicitly included the work of people like Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt, although the persona predates Brandt's Wikipedia-related activity by several months. As Rogers Cadenhead discovered, Jordan alluded to having a Ph.D. in his fourth edit to Wikipedia, in April 2005. The statement was in a post to a talk page in support of his very first edit two months earlier.
For his part, Brandt helped bring the discrepancy to the attention of The New Yorker. As a result, last week the magazine explained what happened in an editors' note: "Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia's management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page. At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay's real name."