Seems an author for Wikipedia has been claiming academic credentials he never had: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6423659.stm. The question of credibility is hardly unique to digital authors but this news will confirm the suspicions of some who find Wikipedia just too questionable an entity to trust. Amid the media coverage of this topic it is easy to forget how much plagiarism and fakery exists in all written work, and it may just be that structure of Wikipedia enables it to more easily identify such errors. Certainly “Essjay” was exposed faster here than many incidences of scientific fakery uncovered over the years – just check out the life and times of Cyril Burt!
V.M Daniel Regents Professor of Information