Comments on: How to deal with liars on Wikipedia?

By: Banned from Wikipedia

Banned from Wikipedia — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 06:25:08 +0000

Future Perfect at Sunrise is Lukas Pietsch – another liar who frauds money given him for research while not performing paid research, but wasting time for editing Wikipedia instead.

http://www.nntpnews.info/threads/9721621-Lukas-Pietsch

By: arensb

arensb — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:43:25 +0000

Essjay lied to all of us in a particularly egregious manner, and the “punishment” is that he gets appointed to yet another important position? What kind of message does this send about Wikipedia?

That he deserves the Presidential Barnstar of Freedom for “doin’ a heckuva job”?

By: Cyde Weys

Cyde Weys — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 14:50:54 +0000

The personal gain part would be the (shortly-lived) job at Wikia. He never would have gotten that job if he wasn’t a prominent member of the Wikipedia community. And one thing that helped him rise to prominence was this belief that he was a tenured college professor. That significantly modifies people’s perceptions.

By: Gary Kirk

Gary Kirk — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 14:09:39 +0000

I think he went too far, certainly, especially with the “I’d hang my PhD on it’s…” line on [[Imprimateur]] (for example).

But was this to his “personal advantage”? I haven’t read into what he was actually arguing about, but how could he actually gain anything from being right or wrong on the issue, other than misplaced trust?

By: Cyde Weys

Cyde Weys — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 23:43:57 +0000

Yeah, I guess you could say I have something against him. It turns out he was a huge liar, basically living a double life online. He represented himself as a totally manufactured persona to myself and many others, and used the persona’s manufactured credentials to his personal advantage. So yeah, I do “have something against him”, although the way you’re phrasing it implies that it’s undeserved, which it certainly isn’t.

By: Gary Kirk

Gary Kirk — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 23:29:55 +0000

Do you have something against Ryan? These recent entries seem very biased anti-Essjay.

By: Cyde Weys

Cyde Weys — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:02:09 +0000

It’s getting play now because it finally hit critical mass. The New Yorker learned of it and amended their story, which caused a chain reaction amongst other sites. It may have been uncommon knowledge in the Wikipedia community, but nobody else was talking about it. Now just go onto Technorati and type in Essjay and see who’s talking about it.

And I checked my IRC logs and it turns out I first learned of this a few months ago, not just one month ago … geez, time goes by so fast.

By: a/c

a/c — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:23:12 +0000

Cyde, I haven’t been on Wikipedia for a few months and I was never a member of any “inner circle”, but I thought this was (mostly) public knowledge within the Wikipedia community? Checking now, Essjay copped to it over a month ago. Any idea why this is getting play now?