By Saturday, the prevailing view was summarized in subject lines like Essjay Must Resign, and notes calling Jordan's actions "plain and simple fraud."
Some Wikipedia users argued that Essjay had compounded the deception by flaunting a fictional doctorate and professorship to influence the editing on the site.
"People have gone through his edits and found places where he was basically cashing in on his fake credentials to bolster his arguments," said Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who is also the founder of The Wikipedia Signpost, the community newspaper for which he is covering the story.
"Those will get looked at again," he said.
In a discussion over the editing of the article with regard to the term "imprimatur," as used in Catholicism, Essjay defended his use of the book Catholicism for Dummies, saying, "This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own PhD on it's credibility."
Over time, Wikipedia users said, Essjay did less editing and writing and spent more time ensuring that the encyclopedia was as free of vandalism and drawn-out editing fights as possible.
By Saturday, Wales changed his mind about the episode. He cleared off the "talk" section of his own Wikipedia user page -- usually cluttered with personal requests, policy debates and compliments -- so that "this statement gets adequate attention" and announced that he had "asked Essjay to resign his positions of trust within the community."
He said "that my past support of Essjay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on."
Complicating matters for Wales was that Essjay had been hired as a community manager by Wikia, which Wales helped to found in 2004. Jordan no longer works for Wikia, the company said.
Snow said the Essjay case "is about the community, the trust the community depends on in terms of being able to review the work we each do."
"Even though you don't necessarily know these people personally," he added, "you see the work enough times and get to know that work."
Jordan announced his resignation from Wikipedia on his Essjay user page on Saturday night. In a brief note below, he said simply: "It's time to make a clean break."
That page had been a model of industry, with tallies of the more than 20,000 articles he edited and statements of personal philosophy and Wikipedia policy.
Where there had been the motto in Latin meaning "Yield not to misfortunes, but advance all the more boldly against them," there is a stark rectangular black box with the word "retired" written in white capital letters.
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