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The recent Essjay brouhaha at Wikipedia has led a lot of denizens there to question whether the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" is in reality more Second Life than Encyclopedia Britannica. For those of you in a coma during March 2007, Essjay was a long-time contributor to Wikipedia who was eventually promoted by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales to the illustrious arbitration committee -- Wiki's grand tribunal that is the last stop in the dispute resolution process. In other words, Essjay had the final say over what information was real and what information should be included into Wikipedia. Problem was,...

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo! Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003. The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”. Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his...

Here's the newest from Sen. Ted Stevens, the man who described the Internet as a series of tubes: It's time for the federal government to ban access to Wikipedia, MySpace, and social networking sites from schools and libraries. Early in January, Stevens introduced Senate bill 49, which among other things, would require that any school or library that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block access to interactive Web sites, including social networking sites, and possibly blogs as well. It appears that the definition of those sites is so vague that it could include sites such as Wikipedia, according...

Under the name Essjay, the contributor edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people with the authority to deal with vandalism and to arbitrate disputes between authors. To the Wikipedia world, Essjay was a tenured professor of religion at a private university with expertise in canon law, according to his user profile. But in fact, Essjay is a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, who attended a number of colleges in Kentucky and lives outside Louisville.

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...

Fake professor in Wikipedia storm Volunteers write and edit the site's thousands of articles 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. Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopaedia...

Following revelations that a high-ranking member of Wikipedia's bureaucracy used his cloak of anonymity to lie about being a professor of religion, the free Internet encyclopedia plans to ask contributors who claim such credentials to identify themselves. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in interviews by phone and instant message Wednesday from Japan that contributors still would be able to remain anonymous. But he said they should only be allowed to cite some professional expertise in a subject if those credentials have been verified. "We always prefer to give a positive incentive rather than absolute prohibition, so that people can contribute...