Wikipedia, credentials and authority

BBC News reports:

Internet site Wikipedia has been hit by controversy after the disclosure that a prominent editor had assumed a false identity complete with fake PhD.

The editor, known as Essjay, had described himself as a professor of religion at a private university.

But he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies to help him work.

He has retired from the site and his authority to edit has been cancelled.

On the same topic, Nick Carr writes:

Of course, one thing that the Essjay scandal reveals is that credentials already play a strong role in Wikipedia's putatively anti-credentialist society. Essjay's great sin - the reason Wales [Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and effective leader] ultimately sent him into exile - wasn't that he lied to the press but that he hoodwinked his fellow Wikipedians, that he used his fake credentials to get them to grant him deference in editing articles. In making his proposal to adopt a formal credentialing process, Wales is simply underscoring what is now obvious: at Wikipedia, credentials matter, whether genuine or fake.

Credentials enable us to invoke an external authority in order to establish our identity in the eyes of others. The Wikipedia community has been fudging the issue of credentials for some time now, because to admit that they matter is to beg the question "who are valid authorities in any given context?"

Wikipedia's editorial community is not, and cannot be, a collective identity solipsistically set apart from the rest of the world. However, by perpetuating a myth that it is, and that its reputation system is "emergent"—dependent on no more than the actions and interactions between Wikipedians, within Wikipedia—the Wikipedia community has been able to avoid squaring up to the "credential authority" issue until now.

It looks like it is an issue that is coming home to roost.