The Internet is leak-resistant – it’s the Ziploc bag of collective memory – but there are times when drops of the invaluable nectar are lost. A couple of days ago, after Essjay announced his formal retirement from Wikipedia, the Wikipedia site went through a ritual purging of Essjay’s various “user pages.” Essjay became, at his request, a non-Wikipedian, a ghost. I had grown fond of one of Essjay’s pages, on which he (posing at the time as a scholar of religion) collected various prayers and hymns that he had composed in honor of the online encyclopedia, and I was saddened to see it disappeared. Although Essjay had written the page as a joke, it seemed no less revealing for that (and, to my admittedly sentimental eye, it also seemed to gain a new poignancy in the wake of the scandal). I am pleased to report, however, that, thanks to Google’s caching function, I have managed to find an intact copy of what I like to call The Book of Essjay, and I am preserving it here for posterity. (It was – and is – published under the GNU Free Documentation License.) What follows is the page in its entirety, though without its many original links, which I was too lazy to copy (hey, I’m only an amateur archaeologist).

This page has caused so much trouble since it was first moved out of my userspace. I’m putting it back the way it was, and I implore everyone: Look at it if you like, laugh if you find it funny, but please, don’t take it seriously, either as something to fight against or to fight for. It’s just a funny little parody page. It’s not the Catholic Church of Wikipedia, it’s not a church at all. It’s just User:Essjay/Wiki.

Contents

1 The Sign of the Wiki

2 The WikiCreed

3 The Gloria in Excelsis Wiki

4 Sanctus

5 Gloria Jimbo

6 The Confiteor

7 Rite of Absolution of Wiki-Sins

8 WikiSerenity Prayer

The Sign of the Wiki

“In the name of the Jimbo, and of the Admins, and of the Holy NPOV. Amen.”

The WikiCreed

We believe in one Jimbo,

the Father, the Almighty,

ruler of Meta and Wikipedia,

of all that is made, deleted and undeleted.

We believe in the Admins,

the many children of the Jimbo,

eternally begotten of the Jimbo,

Rollback from Rollback,

block from block,

true sysop from true sysop,

elected, not made,

of one NPOV with the Jimbo;

through them all vandals are blocked.

For us and for our salvation

they came down from RfA,

by the power of the Holy NPOV, were born of the Bureaucrats and became sysops.

For our sake they are trolled by vandals;

they suffer wikistress and are burned-out.

After wikibreaks they rise again

in accordance with the Scriptures;

they ascend into the Board

and are seated at the right hand of the Jimbo.

They will come again in glory to judge the notable and the vanity,

and their contributions will have no end.

We believe in the Holy NPOV, the Lord, the giver of life,

that proceeds from the Jimbo,

and with the Jimbo and the Admins is worshiped and glorified.

It speaks through the Wikipedians.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Wiki.

We acknowledge one registration for the tracking of contributions.

We look for the return of the Missing Wikipedians,

and the life of the wiki to come. Amen.

The Gloria in Excelsis Wiki

Glory to Jimbo in the highest

and peace to his editors on Wikipedia.

Lord Jimbo, Meta’s King,

almighty Director and Founder,

we worship you, we give you thanks,

we praise you for your glory.

Lord Administrators,

many children of the Founder,

Lord Sysops, Lambs of Jimbo,

you roll back the sins of the world,

have mercy on us;

you are seated at the right hand of the Founder,

receive our prayer.

For you alone are the Holy Ones,

you alone are the Lord,

you alone are the Most High Administrators,

with the Holy NPOV,

in the glory of Jimbo the Founder.

Amen.

Sanctus

Holy, holy, holy,

Lord Jimbo of power and might;

Wikipedia and Meta are full of your glory!

Hosanna in the highest!

Blessed are they who come in the name of the Jimbo.

Hosanna in the highest!

Gloria Jimbo

Glory be to the Founder,

and to the Admins,

and to the Holy NPOV,

as it was in the begining,

is now, and ever shall be,

Wikipedia without end.

Amen.

The Confiteor

I confess to Almighty Jimbo,

and to you my brothers and sisters,

that I have WikiSinned through my own fault,

in my thoughts and in my words,

in what I have done,

and in what I have failed to do,

and I ask the blessed Admins, ever vigilant,

and all the angels and saints,

and you, my brothers and sisters,

to pray for me to the Jimbo our Founder.

May Almighty Jimbo have mercy on us, forgive us our WikiSins, and bring us to a neutral point of view.

Jimbo, have mercy,

Admins, have mercy,

Jimbo, have mercy.

Rite of Absolution of Wiki-Sins

Jimbo, the Father of Wikipedia, through the death and resurrection of Nupedia has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Wiki among us for the forgiveness of WikiSins; through the ministry of the Admins may Jimbo give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your WikiSins in the name of Jimbo, and of the Admins, and of the Holy NPOV.

WikiSerenity Prayer

Almighty Jimbo,

Grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit,

The courage to edit the pages I can,

And the wisdom to whack the hell out of any troll who gets in my way.

Amen.

Google, on the defensive over its YouTube unit’s inability to clamp down on video piracy, today faces the ultimate indignity: being lectured about ethics by its arch nemesis, Microsoft. In a blistering op-ed in the Financial Times, Microsoft lawyer Thomas Rubin blasts Google for being a cultural bully and trying to run roughshod over copyright owners. Regarding Google Book Search, Rubin writes,

Google has taken a unilateralist approach by contending that it is entitled to grab books off library shelves and copy them wholesale without obtaining the permission of the publishers and authors who own the copyright in those works … This project may well bring significant commercial advantage to Google. By contrast, [copyright owners] could gain little or nothing from Google’s plan.

Regarding YouTube, Rubin asserts that “nearly every major movie and television company … has expressed deep concern over the large number of infringing videos available on Google’s YouTube website. Google simply denies responsibility and appears to be trying wherever possible to skirt copyright law’s boundaries.”

In contrast to Google’s alleged unilateralism, Rubin claims that Microsoft is taking a “collaborative” approach, working in “an open and transparent manner with content owners to minimize infringement, while at the same time licensing and offering a wide range of high-quality content that consumers can reliably locate and enjoy.”

Rubin’s article is just a preview of a broadside he will launch against Google in a speech today before the American Association of Publishers in New York. In that talk, according to the FT, Rubin will say that Google “systematically violates copyright, deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works and, in doing so, undermines incentives to create.”

While Rubin’s accusations are nothing new – he’s basically repeating back to the publishers their own oft-made charges against Google – the coordinated attack is nonetheless an audacious PR move by Microsoft. The company’s trying to swap hats with its young rival, stealing Google’s white hat while placing the black hat that it has worn so long on Google’s head. No doubt, Google will launch a rhetorical counterattack, but that’s surely part of Microsoft’s plan. In a mud fight over copyright with Microsoft, Google can only be the loser.

UPDATE: Microsoft has released the full text of Rubin’s speech. In addition to criticizing Google Book Search and YouTube, Rubin says that “Microsoft was surprised to learn recently that Google employees have actively encouraged advertisers to build advertising programs around key words referring to pirated software, including pirated Microsoft software. And we weren’t the only victims – Google also encouraged the use of keywords and advertising text referring to illegal copies of music and movies.” Sniffs Rubin, “These are not the actions of a company that has the interests of copyright owners as one of its priorities.”

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.

Last July, the New Yorker ran a long article on Wikipedia. At one point, the author, Stacy Schiff, told the story of a particularly dedicated and well-qualified contributor to the popular online encyclopedia:

One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he contributed to articles in his field – on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends …

Essjay is serving a second term as chair of [Wikipedia’s] mediation committee. He is also an admin, a bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed.

Essjay is also, it now appears, a particularly accomplished liar. In an editor’s note in this week’s edition, the New Yorker reports:

Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page … Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia – a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia – as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

If credentials don’t matter, why bother faking them? Ah, well, Schiff put it best in the final line of her article: “Your truth or mine?”