At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia admin-istrators and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

The contributors' prognostications are thick with references to protocols and file systems that now seem hopelessly arcane to mainstream users -- FTP and Gopher, for instance. And many of their worries focus on newsgroups, now a Web backwater. (Albeit one that's still going strong.) But look deeper, and you'll see how many predictions are dead-on, though some came to pass in slightly different forms, or with a twist. And you may be struck by how little some fundamental issues have changed: In some cases, simply swap nouns -- most typically, "Web" for "newsgroups" -- and you'll have an accurate portrait of the opportunities and challenges facing the Net today.