In the Fog of Wikiality…

…reality may be a commodity, but a man’s true character will come to the surface.

I first thought to put this in the Zeitgeist but realized I wanted to editorialize a bit… with your kind indulgence, of course.

Wikipedia founder and self-proclaimed “anticredentialist.” Jimmy Wales seems a little touchy about ‘co-founder’ Larry Sanders calling himself a ‘co-founder’. The excerpt below is from an Associated Press article (via Huffington Post) published today. (Emphasis added.)

Sanger Says He Co-Started Wikipedia

The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn’t seem particularly controversial _ Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder.

…

Wales has repeatedly tried to address this – even going so far as editing his own Wikipedia biography to tone down credit for Sanger. Such autobiographical contributions are frowned upon in Wikipedia’s community, and Wales apologized after his changes were noticed and publicized by blogger Rogers Cadenhead in 2005.

In a lengthy instant-message exchange about Citizendium and other topics, Wales raised the subject of Sanger’s role: “When you write this up please do not uncritically repeat Sanger’s absurd claim to be the co-founder of Wikipedia.”

“I know of no one who was there at the company at the beginning who would think it anything other than laughable,” he added.

Yet a few moments later, Wales asserted that he didn’t really care: “I am not bent out of shape about it,” he wrote. “The facts are on my side, which is why I bother so little about it.”

Read the complete article here.

When I read the end of the article – the ‘I don’t really care” attitude , the ‘I don’t bother with that’ description – I was reminded of something I had read before… and I found it here on NFZ, (of course) first published in August of 2006. Here I quote the end of that MTV article (Emphasis added.):

Can Wikipedia Handle Stephen Colbert’s Truthiness?.

…

“It’s fine,” Wales told MTV News. “We have a sense of humor, and if we wanted to, we could figure out if it was really him making the changes. But why bother? We banned the user because of his or her behavior, because they were messing around with some articles and encouraging other people to mess with several articles about elephants.”

Wales wasn’t worried that Colbert’s humorous jabs at Wikipedia — or his coining of the term “Wikiality” — will undermine the site’s goal of one day creating a free, verifiable, worldwide information source. And he said he’d be more than willing to have his administrators unblock the StephenColbert username if the host would just apologize on air.

“We try as hard as we can to make sure every piece of information on the site is backed up by verifiable sources, and if something is under dispute, we remove it until people can provide us with sources,” he said. “Also, I’ve met Stephen, and I know how he is. He likes to have a joke. The one time we met, he told me that we had to fix the article about him on our site, because it said he was married. I said to him, ‘But I thought you were married.’ And he replied, ‘Well, I am, but it disappoints my female fans.’ ”

Read the complete article here.

Well, given Stephen’s uncanny ‘B.S. detector’ and his love of status shift for our, and his, amusement, it now seems apparent to me why he relishes the whole Wikiality campaign. I do not mean to imply that it is meant as a personal attack on Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is ripe for satirical critique on it’s own. But given that Stephen has met Wales and given Wales’ apparently superficial ‘coolness’ it must make Stephen giggle a bit when he thinks of little Jimmy.