Originally posted on March 8, 2007 @ 1:21 pm

Did you hear that a prominent Wikipedia contributor lied about his academic credentials?

Apparently “Essjay,” a frequent Wikipedia contributor, claimed to be a theology professor.

The publicly editable online encyclopedia is considering a plan to ask entry authors to prove their expertise before citing it.

Last week, The New Yorker magazine, having interviewed “Essjay” for an article about Wikipedia last year, revealed that he was a 24-year-old with no advanced degrees.

In the wake of the scandal, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has proposed reviving a proposal he put forth two years ago.

He suggests that Wikipedia adopt a system similar to Amazon’s Real Names initiative for user reviews.

Wikipedians would still be allowed to be anonymous if they wished but those who want to be identified as having “Verified Credentials” would have to submit reasonable proof.

“The point is to make sure that people are being honest with us and with the general public,” says Wales on his Wikipedia User Talk page.

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.

Wales admits such a system would not be perfect.

People, he says, “could fake their credentials, but I don’t think we need to design against some mad, worst case scenario.”

Interestingly, a statement from the Wikimedia Foundation argues against the relevance of credentials as an indication of authority:

Content is, and has always been, judged based on its quality, and not the credential of the individual contributor.

As such, the community is discouraging people from arguing from positions of authority.

Arguing from authority to prove a point would never be accepted in academic paper and should never be accepted in Wikipedia.

Originally posted on March 23, 2007 @ 9:23 am

The Child Online Protection Act was effectively killed by a federal judge on Thursday March 22, 2007 and the prospects for further legislation of its type don’t look promising.

U.S. District Court Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. on Thursday struck down the law, also known as COPA, calling it unconstitutional.

His 84-page ruling on COPA indicated that it is simultaneously too broad and too narrow.

Federal lawmakers introduced COPA in 1998 with the intent of protecting children from porn and other indecent material on the Internet.

The law would have threatened commercial Web sites with fines up to $50,000 USD a day and six months in prison for each day they disseminated information deemed “harmful to children.”

It never took effect because a court barred enforcement pending the outcome of legal challenges.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Focus on the Family agree on very little, but both said the ruling will make it difficult for lawmakers to adopt similar legislation to protect children from online pornography.

Judge Reed acknowledged that as well.

This creates an interesting conundrum for defendant where broadening COPA’s reach would likely make it overbroad, but by narrowing its reach to HTTP or successor protocols, Congress has made COPA under inclusive and less effective than filters.

– Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr.

Reed said the law is narrow in its failure to address technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing, community sites and foreign sources, but is broad in that it targets speech protected under the U.S. Constitution.

Daniel Weiss, a senior analyst for media and sexuality with Focus on the Family, said pornography destroys marriages and even young children can become addicted to it.

He said his group is doing all it can to reduce both supply and demand.

Our concern is, as it always has been, that, as this was tied up in the courts, children are continuing to be harmed by pornography online and in great numbers.

– Daniel Weiss
Focus on the Family

Weiss said businesses, especially Internet companies, should take some responsibility for the problem.

He echoed Judge Reed’s criticism of the government for failing to prosecute under existing laws that ban certain types of pornography.

Focus on the Family will continue educating parents about how to protect their children, through the use of filtering technology and other methods, Weiss said.

The group also will press lawmakers to draft legislation with the same intent as COPA, difficult as that may be after Thursday’s ruling.