Jimmy Wales Invites Admin to Succeed Elsewhere

Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales threw Ryan Jordan under the bus this morning:

I have been for several days in a remote part of India with little or no Internet access. I only learned this morning that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes. I understood this to be primarily the matter of a pseudonymous identity (something very mild and completely understandable given the personal dangers possible on the Internet) and not a matter of violation of people's trust. I want to make it perfectly clear that my past support of EssJay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on. Even now, I have not been able to check diffs, etc.

I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the community.

Assuming this is an order disguised as a request, it's the right outcome, but it's impossible to come away from this incident with much confidence in Wikipedia when so many site contributors defended his right to lie about his identity. There aren't many situations in life where an anonymous mob of people, working in an atmosphere allergic to the concept of personal accountability, is relied upon to achieve a societal good.

Wikipedia · 2007/03/03 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Cracker Adds PHP Exploit to WordPress 2.1.1

WordPress has issued an urgent upgrade for users who downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days:

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can.

Wordpress · Security · 2007/03/03 · Comment · Link

Wikipedia Editor Faces Consequences

One of my favorite short pieces of writing is Douglas Adams' pedantic history of the world, a chronology that notes the start of the new millenium. He must have been sorely disappointed when the events of Jan. 1, 2001, did not transpire as expected.

I am a pedant. I once alarmed my relatives in the middle of the night by rearranging their collection of leather-bound Franklin Library Pulitzer Prize classics in the order they won the prize. My brother-in-law, who must also be a pedant, immediately noticed the next morning that the books were no longer in alphabetical order by author's last name. In the ensuing disagreement, a pedantic time was had by all. (Wikipedia, to its enduring shame, lists winners in reverse chronological order.)

As a pedant, I've tried to resist getting sucked into Wikipedia's internal politics, because I know I'll have such a great time I'll completely lose interest in the outside world.

Wikipedia has developed a labyrynthine internal bureaucracy at Internet speed. It's so compelling that some of the most active contributors to the site don't work on encyclopedia entries at all, contributing instead to the endless debates about the production of encyclopedia entries. Masters of the form take it a level deeper, debating the policies that govern these debates.

Bureaucracy's engrained so deep in Wikipedia that there's an official job called Bureaucrat. Twenty-three people have attained this level, a heady rush that must be similar to how I felt when my magic-user reached 22,501 experience points and became a Thaumaturgist before he was eaten by a bulette.

I broke down and posted around a dozen comments yesterday within Wikipedia about Ryan "Essjay" Jordan, the fake tenured professor of theology experiencing a come to Jesus moment after rising to Wikipedia's leadership. He's been pimping his bogus academic credentials since the first edits he made on the site and was promoted by founder Jimmy Wales after admitting the ruse. As a member of Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, Jordan will judge whether site contributors should be banned for inappropriate or unethical behavior.

If there's any accountability at all within Wikipedia, there's no way this guy should remain in a position of authority. Wikipedia has huge potential for misuse, as any number of biographical subjects can attest, and it depends entirely on the notion that its editorial process can be trusted to produce an authoritative reference work read by millions of people.

As it turns out, I might get my wish that someone be held accountable over this incident. A Wikipedia administrator with 40,000 edits has suggested that I lose editing privileges.

For the past 48 hours, Rcade has made absolutely no contributions to the project except to this discussion. ... There are limits to discussing this subject, and Rcade needs to be introduced to these limits and now.

When I told this to my wife, she was completely in favor of my ouster. I'm glad she doesn't have an account on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia · Pedantry · 2007/03/02 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Wikipedia Admin Loses His Religion

Seth Finkelstein covers the latest scandal to embarrass Wikipedia: a site administrator and Wikia employee who's been lying for years about his academic credentials.

Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old in Kentucky who's never taught a class, claimed on his Wikipedia bio and in an interview with the New Yorker to be a tenured professor of religion with four degrees: a bachelor of arts in religious studies, master of arts in religion, doctorate of philosophy in theology and doctorate in canon law. The magazine ran a correction after he bragged on his Wikipedia talk page about fooling reporter Stacy Schiff and the magazine's fact checker:

I did six hours of interviews with the reporter, and two with a fact checker, but I was really surprised that they were willing to do an interview with someone who they couldn't confirm; I can only assume that it is proof I was doing a good job playing the part.

Jordan serves on one of Wikipedia's management committees and was hired in January by Wikia, the for-profit company affiliated with the site, after acknowledging the fraud. If Jordan can be believed, he told Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about faking his bio before being hired:

Before I accepted the position, I provided all my real details to Angela and Jimbo, and immediately provided the same information to Brad Patrick; I also placed it on my Wikia userpage, from where I expected it would fairly quickly make it's way back to Wikipedia.

Reporters who cover Wikipedia should consider its role in this deception. Someone at Wikipedia recommended Jordan to Schiff as an interview subject, Wales hired him after he admitted the ruse and nobody told the New Yorker it had been scammed. When contacted by the magazine, Wales said, "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it."

In a furious debate going on within Wikipedia, one of Jordan's fans makes a defense of his actions that nicely demonstrates what a trainwreck the project has become under the situational ethics of its management:

... 2. If you believe what people say on the internet, you are stupid. 3. There is no honesty policy on wikipedia, and people have a right to protect themselves. ... 5. If the New Yorker is stupid enough to believe everything everyone tells them, that's their problem.

Update:

A member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Erik Möller, is urging Ryan Jordan to step down:

Creating a pseudonym is one thing. Creating an elaborate fake persona with fake credentials, and using it in arguments, letters, and interviews is another. I am deeply troubled by this behavior, consider it highly unethical, and would like to ask you to seriously consider stepping down from your official Wikimedia roles. At the very least, I believe you owe the community an apology for this behavior. You have damaged both the reputation of the project, and your own. I am deeply saddened and disappointed.

Möeller was elected to the board in September 2006 to assume a term that ends in December 2007.

Wikipedia · Journalism · 2007/03/01 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Toronto Star: Only 100 Blogs Make Money

A story on the business side of blogging in today's Toronto Star makes a wildly inaccurate claim -- only the top 100 blogs make money.

Many blogs do make money but a vast majority of them don't, according to Derek Gordon, vice-president of marketing for Technorati, a San Francisco-based Internet search engine for blogs. The site tracks about 65 million blogs. It also ranks them.

"Typically, the top 100 blogs do some form of monetization," says Gordon.

There's money being made in blogging beyond the big names. I run four blogs that aren't anywhere close to the top 100 -- ranking on Technorati from 4,000 to 10,000 -- and they've become a decent part-time job. (I could double the income overnight if I wasn't rejecting all text-link ad offers.) Randy Charles Morin recently turned his KBCafe blog network into a full-time gig because of the revenue it's earning.

Take a look at the rate card for the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the group that kicked my ass to the curb in 2005. Even in a slow period before the presidential election ramps up, the 20th most popular blog in that network is making $500 this week in ad revenue.

Aaron Brazell recently put his TechnoSailor blog up for auction on SitePoint Marketplace, a place where web publishers can sell established web sites.

TechnoSailor has decent-but-not great numbers -- a Technorati ranking of 2,300, Google page rank of 6 and monthly income of $250 -- yet the auction sold for $23,750. The deal subsequently fell through when they couldn't reach terms on a contract, but it's comparable to what buyers are paying for other sites in the same marketplace.

A business reporter who thinks there's no money in blogging should talk to people like Morin, BlogAds founder Henry Copeland and the publisher of SitePoint. As blogging matures and some publishers look to get out, the ones who sell out are going to be pleasantly surprised at what their sites are worth.

Blogging · Business · 2007/02/26 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Eric Meyer: 'Diversity is Not of Itself Important'

I was disappointed to read this morning that Eric Meyer, organizer of the An Event Apart series of conferences, doesn't think it's important to take proactive steps to recruit more female speakers at tech events:

In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don't feel that I have anything to address next time around. What's important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That's it. That's always been the alpha and omega of my thinking, and it will continue to be so the next time, and time after that, and the time after that.

You'll note that nowhere in that list do you find gender, race, creed, or any other such parameter. Those things are completely unimportant to me when organizing a conference.

The fact that he's addressing the issue at all is a step in the right direction, since conference organizers are starting to realize they risk a public flogging when their speaking roster's a men's club. I wrote last year about the Spring Experience, a Java event organized by NoFluffJustStuff that was 0-for-38. Jason Kottke plays the same numbers game on his blog and finds more 0-fers.

Whenever someone in Meyer's position claims that he's running a meritocracy, I check the bios of the speakers at his event and find reasons to doubt it.

An Event Apart Seattle in June has nine announced speakers, all male. Though a couple names are so big you'd have trouble finding replacements of equal stature and marketability, the total absence of women says more about his recruitment process than the pool of potential speakers.

I spent an hour looking into the companies and projects associated with his speakers and found 10 women well-qualified to appear:

• Rachel Andrew, the author of 11 books on CSS and web publishing and a steering committee member of the Web Standards Project
• Kimberly Blessing, colead of the Web Standards Project and the manager of PayPal's web development platform
• Elizabeth Castro, author of the HTML, XHTML, and CSS and XML for the World Wide Web books in the Visual QuickStart Guide series
• Heather Powazek Champ, founder of JPG Magazine, Flickr community manager and recipient of a Bloggies lifetime achievement award
• Janice Fraser, cofounder of Adaptive Path, interaction design teacher at San Francisco State University and frequent speaker on user experience
• Kelly Goto, founder of the strategic design firm Gotomedia, author of Web Redesign: Workflow that Works and a speaker at SVEF
• Molly Holzschlag, author of 30 books on CSS and web design, Web Standards Project steering committee member and an invited expert for the World Wide Web Consortium HTML and GEO working groups
• Laura Lemay, million-selling author of the Teach Yourself books on HTML, XHTML and Java
• Dori Smith, Web Standards Project steering committee member, author of Macromedia Dreamweaver 8: Visual QuickStart Guide and a frequent conference speaker
• Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the CSS-promoting International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet, Santa Clara University School of Law lecturer and frequent speaker on accessibility

A couple of people I knew already, but most were found simply by browsing the bios of Meyer's chosen speakers. He could've found these people by asking his own invitees. On Shelley Powers' blog, Meyer made this comment in defense of his position:

... if it's a marketing failure, the conference will fail, crater my bank account, and endanger my ability to feed my wife and daughter.

If his daughter follows his footsteps and runs into the stupid self-perpetuating belief that women interested in tech are outside the norm, I wonder if he'll still find the issue completely unimportant.

Diversity · Css · Web Design · 2007/02/24 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Eliot Spitzer Files UDRP to Take EliotSpitzer.Com

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer appears to have begun legal proceedings to take the domain names eliotspitzer.com and eliotspitzer.org away from Eric Keller, a New Jersey online candy retailer who registered them in 2001.

A Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) arbitration began today regarding the domains at the National Arbitration Forum. Arbitrators will decide whether the domains were registered and used in bad faith, whether Keller has legitimate rights in the names, and whether Spitzer has used his name as a trademark in commerce. He must prevail on all three to take the domains.

The domains are parked today, but archived web pages from the Internet Wayback Machine indicate that eliotspitzer.com was used for several years to direct traffic to eBulkCandy.com LLC, a candy retailer based in Trenton, N.J.

eBulkCandy, which also operates stores at JordanAlmonds.Com and HometownCandy.Com, has been the subject of numerous consumer complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the complaint site Rip Off Report.

On Dec. 5, Keller was indicted by the Department of Justice on 10 counts of mail fraud for allegedly bilking UPS out of charges for candy shipments:

From September 22, 2001 through February 2005, Keller created a series of bogus UPS shipping accounts for the purpose of shipping candy to ebulkcandy customers, and failed to pay UPS for the shipping. The indictment alleges that at the time Keller opened the UPS accounts, he had no intention of paying UPS for shipping services. According to the charges, defendant Eric Keller defrauded UPS of approximately $154,581.

He faces up to 200 years imprisonment and a $2.5 million fine.

In 2003, Keller was sued in Illinois by Brach's Confections for cybersquatting and trademark infringement over nine domains that incorporated Brach's into their names: brach.us, brachcandy.com, brachs.net, brachs.org, brachscandies.com, brachscandy.net, brachsconfections.com, brachsoutlet.com and brachswholesale.com.

One filing related to the suit alleged that Keller dodged a process server:

... Keller repeatedly tried to avoid service, ranging from refusing mail service to refusing to accept service through a car window when confronted by a process server. In the last instance, the process server left the two sets of summons and complaint for Keller ... by the car containing the defendant on May 16, 2003. When the process server returned a short while later both Keller and the summonses and complaints had left the side of the car.

Udrp · Politics · Domains · 2007/02/22 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

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