Essjay Controversy

The Essjay controversy was an incident concerning a prominent Wikipedia participant and salaried Wikia employee, known by the username Essjay, who later identified himself as Ryan Jordan. Jordan held trusted volunteer positions within Wikipedia known as "administrator", "bureaucrat", "arbitrator", and "mediator".

On July 24, 2006, a thread titled "Who is Essjay?" (later retitled "Who is Essjay?, Probably he's Ryan Jordan" after Jordan's self-disclosure) was started on watchdog site Wikipedia Review, the ensuing discussion bringing to light the contradictions, yet 5 days later The New Yorker published an interview with the "professor". Wikipedia Review found definitive proof that Jordan made false claims about his academic qualifications and professional experiences on his Wikipedia user page, and in the interview for The New Yorker, and as a result in January 2007 Daniel Brandt contacted the author of the article in The New Yorker about the discrepancies in Jordan's biography and the exploitation of his supposed qualifications as leverage in internal disputes over Wikipedia content. The issues highlighted within the controversy included his falsification of a persona and qualifications, the impact of this deception on perceptions of Wikipedia (and its policies and credibility), and the quality of decisions made in his promotion, support, and employment.

Reactions to the disclosure were diverse, encompassing commentary and articles in the electronic, print, and broadcast media; the Wikipedia community researched Essjay's article edits to check for errors and debated proposals to improve the project's handling of personal identification. In his editorial activities Jordan spent less time editing the content of articles and more time addressing vandalism and resolving editorial disputes.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales initially supported Essjay's use of a persona, saying, "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it." Later, Wales withdrew his support and asked for Essjay's resignation from his positions with Wikipedia and Wikia. Wales stated that he withdrew his support when he learned "that Essjay used his false credentials in content disputes" on Wikipedia.