In the wake of the Essjay mess, Wikipedia’s long-time “anti-credentialist” philosophy is beginning to crack. Head Wikipedian Jimmy Wales proposed Monday that the online encyclopedia begin to verify and certify any academic or other credentials claimed by its authors. Writes Wales:

I think it imperative that we make some positive moves here… we have a real opportunity here to move the quality of Wikipedia forward by doing something that many have vaguely thought to be a reasonably good idea if worked out carefully … The point is to make sure that people are being honest with us and with the general public. If you don’t care to tell us that you are a PhD (or that you are not), then that’s fine: your editing stands or falls on its own merit. But if you do care to represent yourself as something, you have to be able to prove it. This policy will be coupled with a policy of gentle (or firm) discouragement for people to make claims like those that EssJay made, unless they are willing to back them up.

Wales notes that he made a similar proposal to adopt a “Verified Credentials” program two years ago. At the time, he argued:

people wonder, and not unreasonably, who we all are. Why should the world listen to us about anything? People think, and not unreasonably, that credentials say something helpful about that. As it turns out, we mostly do know something about what we edit, and although we never want Wikipedia to be about a closed club of credential fetishists, there’s nothing particularly wrong with advertising that, hey, we are *random* people on the Internet *g*, but not random *morons* after all.

Many of Wikipedia’s most eloquent advocates have argued that the encyclopedia’s practice of judging an author’s work solely on its own merits without being influenced by the author’s credentials is one of the project’s core strengths, both ideologically and practically. Recently, in comparing Wikipedia to Citizendium, a competing volunteer-written encyclopedia being organized by Wikipedia cofounder and apostate Larry Sanger, Clay Shirky wrote that Citizendium’s focus on establishing the expertise of contributors through their credentials would likely doom the effort:

The first order costs will come from the certification and deference itself. By proposing to recognize external credentialing mechanisms, Citizendium sets itself up to take on the expenses of determining thresholds and overlaps of expertise. A masters student in psychology doing work on human motivation may know more about behavioral economics than a Ph.D. in neo-classical economics. It would be easy to label them both experts, but on what grounds should their disputes be adjudicated?

On Wikipedia, the answer is simple — deference is to contributions, not to contributors, and is always provisional … Wikipedia certainly has management costs (all social systems do), but it has the advantage that those costs are internal, and much of the required oversight is enforced by moral suasion. It doesn’t take on the costs of forcing deference to experts because it doesn’t recognize the category of ‘expert’ as primitive in the system. Experts contribute to Wikipedia, but without requiring any special consideration.

Citizendium’s second order costs will come from policing the system as a whole. If the process of certification and enforcement of deference become even slightly annoying to the users, they will quickly become non-users. The same thing will happen if the projection of force needed to manage Citizendium delegitimizes the system in the eyes of the contributors.

While Wales’s proposal certainly doesn’t go as far as Sanger’s plan in embracing what Shirky calls “external credentialing mechanisms,” Wales’s proposal would explicitly “recognize” – and hence begin to give special consideration to – those external credentials (and the “experts” who hold them). No longer would “the answer” be “simple”; deference would begin to be granted to contributors, based on their academic degrees and other “verified” credentials, as well as to their contributions. A formal system of credentials would, inevitably, exert influence, especially since Wales himself ties the adoption of the system to improvements in the quality of the encyclopedia. And, as Wales admits in making the proposal, Wikipedia would face some of the costs and complexities of certification and policing that Shirky mentions. Indeed, with his proposal, Wales shifts himself in the direction of Sanger’s camp. Once you impose a credentialing system – even if it’s “optional” – you change the dynamic of an organization and set it on a new course. Credentialism is a slippery slope.

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 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.

UPDATE (3/7): The Associated Press picks up on the story, with some quotes from Wales.

Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, recently decried what he sees as a tendency among journalists to characterize blogs as “a ‘parasitic’ medium that wouldn’t be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers.” He calls the charge “a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work.”

I confess to having trafficked in this “insult” in the past. A little over a year ago, noting the dominance of New York Times articles on the technology news-headline site Techmeme, I wrote, with a tacit nod to Eric Raymond, “Sometimes I think that if it weren’t for the shadow of the cathedral, there’d be no place to set up the bazaar.” I suppose my intent at the time was to get a rise out of folks like Niles who are always ready to ride to the defense of the blogosphere’s honor – that tattered maidenhead – but since then I’ve come to believe that being a literary parasite is no bad thing. I’d argue, in fact, that parasitism is blogging’s most distinctive quality.

What got me blogging, nearly two years ago, was the attraction of working in a new and still embryonic literary form. Such an opportunity doesn’t come around very often – never, basically – so I figured I might as well give it a whirl. Bloggers blog for a whole lot of reasons, of course, but what I think sets blogs apart, as a literary rather than a technical form, is that they offer the opportunity for a writer to document his immediate responses to his day-to-day reading. The continuous flow of text through the eye and mind is a characteristic of many people’s lives, but the experience has never been able to be captured in the way it can through blogging. Diaries come closest, but they’re private rather than public, and I’d argue that they place more distance between the act of reading and the act of writing about reading.

The reactionary, or parasitical, quality of blogging defined the form from the start. Blogs, after all, began as logs, time-stamped catalogues of usually brief descriptions, and sometimes critiques, of what their writers found in their daily perambulations around the World Wide Web. Many of the most venerable bloggers – the Winers and the Searlses of the world – continue to write in this form. The least interesting blogs, from my perspective, anyhow, are the ones that simply replicate existing journalistic forms such as news articles, company profiles, or product reviews. They can be very useful, and they can certainly be very popular, but they’re blogs in a technical sense only.

I’ve been reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, about the great London cholera epidemic of 1854. The book opens with a richly scatalogical survey of the city’s teeming underclass economy, which was built almost entirely on scavenging. The poor were parasites who sustained themselves by collecting the leavings of other Londoners – rags, bones, bits of coal and wood, feces – and, with remarkable enterprise, transforming them into cash. There was even, Johnson tells us, a booming market in dog shit – lovingly known as “pure” – which tanners purchased to rub on their leathers to neutralize the lime they used to remove hair from hides.

“We’re naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste,” writes Johnson. “But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: … this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people … Far from being unproductive vagabonds … these people were actually performing an essential function for their community.”

Johnson goes on to draw an analogy between these human waste-recyclers and their microscopic counterparts, bacteria. “Without the bacteria-driven processes of decomposition, the earth would have been overrun by offal and carcasses eons ago,” he reminds us. “If the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be extinguished within a matter of years.”

I like to think of the blogosphere as a vast, earth-engirdling digestive track, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins). Another word for “parasitic,” in this context, is “critical.” Blogging is at its essence a critical form, a means of recycling other writings to ensure that every nutritional molecule, whether real or imagined, is fully consumed. To be called a literary parasite is no insult. It’s a compliment.

So, yes, Rough Type is a parasite, a bacterium, a scavenger of bones and turds and the occasional piece of pretty cloth. And I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

Head Wikipedian Jimmy Wales, having previously defended the Wikipedian administrator Ryan Jordan, who faked an elaborate online identity – “Essjay” – as a distinguished religion scholar, has this morning asked his beleaguered colleague to resign, saying that his “past support of EssJay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on.”

Writes Wales:

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 have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the community … Despite my personal forgiveness, I hope that he will accept my resignation request, because forgiveness or not, these positions are not appropriate for him now.

Wales also offers fatherly counsel to other Wikipedians: “In terms of the full parameters of what happens next, I advise (as usual) that we take a calm, loving, and reasonable approach … Wikipedia is built on (among other things) twin pillars of trust and tolerance. The integrity of the project depends on the core community being passionate about quality and integrity, so that we can trust each other. The harmony of our work depends on human understanding and forgiveness of errors.”

There’s something poignant about this whole episode, as Seth Finkelstein points out: “As I read further about the scandal … I ended up feeling more sadness for [Jordan] than anger. In fact, I think some of the fury at him from critics, while very understandable, is a bit misplaced. [Wikipedia] fundamentally runs by an extremely deceptive sort of social promise. It functions by selling the heavy contributors on the dream, the illusion, that it’ll give them the prestige of an academic (‘writing an encyclopedia’).” Finkelstein notes that Jordan’s alter ego – a tenured professor of theology with four degrees – represents “what he wants to be … what he wishes he was. And Wikipedia gave him the opportunity to represent himself as this fantasy.”

Finkelstein points to a remarkable letter that “Essjay” wrote to a real college professor, defending the integrity of his beloved encyclopedia. It reads in part:

I am an administrator of the online encyclopedia project Wikipedia. I am also a tenured professor of theology; feel free to have a look at my Wikipedia userpage to gain an idea of my background and credentials. I am contacting you because I was contacted by one of your students concerning an email you sent to one of your classes … I find it very disturbing that you included the statement “it is my understanding that anyone can put anything there, and it is not vetted for accuracy.” … Well credentialed individuals (myself included) participate in the project in the hopes that our involvement will help to make Wikipedia a better source, and dispel the misconceptions held by the public … Let me leave you with a quote from our founder, Jimmy Wales, which puts our mission into words with Jimmy’s amazing ability for clarity: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”

It would take someone wiser than I to peel back all the layers of self-deception found here. Marshall Poe, who wrote a long and rather starry-eyed article on Wikipedia for the Atlantic last year, suggested in an interview that the Wikipedia phenomenon has its roots in the craze, during the 70s and 80s, for the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons. “Wales and all of these guys were involved in that stuff,” Poe said. “They loved playing those games.” In Dungeons & Dragons, he continued,

you took on a new identity, you inhabited a different world, you could act in ways you’d never acted before, ways that weren’t consistent with your real-life community but were consistent with that new world. It was really very liberating, a vessel for your imagination and also for your intelligence. Because a “world” had to be consistent. That was one of the rules. You couldn’t just do anything. So it could become very Byzantine, very complex.

In the byzantine world of Wikipedia, with its arcane language, titles, and rules and its multitude of clans, Essjay wore the robes of a wizard. He was allowed to stand beside – and to serve – Jimbo the White. Together, they would bring “knowledge” to the unenlightened masses. But then the Wizard Essjay tried to slip through the gates of the real. Now the game is up.

Oracle’s great mopping up exercise continues. Today, the corporate software giant is announcing its purchase of Hyperion, a midsize player in the market that specializes in “business intelligence” applications, programs that suck information out of other programs and serve it up in formats that help executives make sense of their operations. Oracle is paying $3.3 billion, or 2 YouTubes, for the company.

It’s good to see Larry Ellison, the undertaker of client-server computing, getting back to business. He’s been taking something of a breather since his year-long shopping spree in 2005, when Oracle swept up PeopleSoft, Siebel, Retek,TimesTen, ProfitLogic, 360Commerce, and sundry other coding shops.

What Ellison knows is that the big growth days for Old World Software (the kind you actually have to install on your own machines) are over, but huge profits will be available for years to any company able to roll up the major suppliers, consolidate customer accounts, slash costs, and basically feed off the trillions of dollars of legacy systems that sit heavily in private data centers the world over. Those systems aren’t going anywhere fast.

The other goal is, of course, to eat away at the franchise of archenemy SAP, the biggest supplier of heavy-duty enterprise applications. Oracle gleefully pokes at the German behemoth in its press release today:

“Hyperion is the latest move in our strategy to expand Oracle’s offerings to SAP customers,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips . . . “Oracle already has PeopleSoft HR, Siebel CRM, G-Log, Demantra, i-flex, Oracle Retail, and Oracle Fusion Middleware installed at SAP’s largest ERP customers. Now Oracle’s Hyperion software will be the lens through which SAP’s most important customers view and analyze their underlying SAP ERP data.”

In case that isn’t clear enough, Oracle’s calling SAP’s bread-and-butter ERP system a low-level industrial commodity.

Now that McNealy’s left Sun, Oracle reigns supreme as Silicon Valley’s trash talker of record. The traditional corporate data center is dead, and Larry Ellison is dancing on its grave.