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In July—when The New Yorker ran a long and relatively positive piece about Wikipedia—I argued that the old-media method of laboriously checking each fact was superior to the wiki model, where assertions have to be judged based on their plausibility. I claimed that personal experience as a journalist gave me special insight into such matters, and concluded: “the expensive, arguably old fashioned approach of The New Yorker and other magazines still delivers a level of quality I haven’t found, and do not expect to find, in the world of community-created content.”

Apparently, I was wrong. It turns out that EssJay, one of the Wikipedia users described in The New Yorker article, is not the “tenured professor of religion at a private university” that he claimed he was, and that The New Yorker reported him to be. He’s actually a 24-year-old, sans doctorate, named Ryan Jordan.

Jimmy Wales, who is as close to being in charge of Wikipedia as anybody is, has had an intricate progression of thought on the matter, ably chronicled by Seth Finklestein. His ultimate reaction (or at any rate, his current public stance as of this writing) is on his personal page in Wikipedia

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.

As Seth points out, this is an odd reaction since it seems simultaneously to forgive EssJay for lying to The New Yorker (“something very mild”) and to hold him much more strongly to account for lying to other Wikipedia users. One could argue that lying to The New Yorker—and by extension to its hundreds of thousands of subscribers—was in the aggregate much worse than lying to the Wikipedians. One could also argue that Mr. Jordan’s appeal to institutional authority, which was as successful as it was dishonest, raises profound questions about the Wikipedia model.

But I won’t make either of those arguments. Instead, I’ll return to the issue that has me putting my foot in my mouth: How can a reader decide what to trust? I predicted you could trust The New Yorker, and as it turns out, you couldn’t.

Philip Tetlock, a long-time student of the human penchant for making predictions, has found (in a book whose text I can’t link to, but which I encourage you to read) that people whose predictions are falsified typically react by making excuses. They typically claim that they are off the hook because the conditions based on which they predicted a certain result were actually not as they seemed at the time of the inaccurate prediction. This defense is available to me: The New Yorker fell short of its own standards, and took EssJay at his word without verifying his identity or even learning his name. He had, as all con men do, a plausible-sounding story, related in this case to a putative fear of professional retribution that in hindsight sits rather uneasily with his claim that he had tenure. If the magazine hadn’t broken its own rules, this wouldn’t have gotten into print.

But that response would be too facile, as Tetlock rightly observes of the general case. Granted that perfect fact checking makes for a trustworthy story; how do you know when the fact checking is perfect and when it is not? You don’t. More generally, predictions are only as good as someone’s ability to figure out whether or not the conditions are right to trigger the predicted outcome.

So what about this case: On the one hand, incidents like this are rare and tend to lead the fact checkers to redouble their meticulousness. On the other, the fact claims in a story that are hardest to check are often for the same reason the likeliest ones to be false. Should you trust the sometimes-imperfect fact checking that actually goes on?

My answer is yes. In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.