Word War III

Pellegrini shrugs off the physical threats he has received as harmless venting. Most memorable, he notes, was the time Jonathon Sharkey, oddball presidential candidate and founder of the Vampires, Witches and Pagans Party, had problems with his profile that, in his mind, could only be properly addressed by the remedial impaling of some Wikipedians.

At their worst, Wikipedia article deliberations ramble on like bad wedding reception toasts. In Ahmadinejad's case, a series of secondary issues cropped up. Did the photo showing him with America-bashing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez constitute unintentional bias? (Yes, was the discussion-page consensus; a replacement photo was found.) Was Ahmadinejad involved in the U.S. Embassy siege in Tehran in 1979? (That misconception briefly made it into the article before getting axed.) Is it fair game to make mention of anti-Ahmadinejad student demonstrations in Iran? (Yes.) Is conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer an acceptably objective source to quote? (No.)

How to handle the hot-potato allegation of anti-Semitism continued to defy resolution for months.

"Ahmadinejad is infamous for saying Israel must be 'wiped off the map,' and saying that the Holocaust is a 'myth.' This is what [should] be reported in the lead, not whitewashed statements," insisted "Jayjg," a Wikipedian admin with an interest in Jewish subjects and more than 62,000 edits under his belt.

"I gave up on Wikipedia," countered "Gerash77," a Farsi speaker who said he'd urged the Iranian authorities to block Internet access to "this ridiculous patcho-pedia."

LAST SUMMER, Virgil Griffith, a computer science graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, got the urge to unmask some of English Wikipedia's warriors and the biases they might bring to the table. He compiled a database of 34 million edits made between February 2002 and August 2007, and cross-referenced that information with the IP (internet protocol) addresses of the computers from which the edits originated. He then tracked down the organizations assigned to those IPs.

Griffith named his creation Wiki-Scanner and turned it into a free, easily searchable Web site (Wikiscanner.virgil.gr). He connected some interesting dots. Someone using a computer at the North Canton, Ohio, headquarters of Diebold, Inc., maker of electronic voting machines, had excised multiple paragraphs from a Wikipedia article about voting machines. Those paragraphs happened to be critical of Diebold and pointed out that the company's CEO had raised money for President Bush. Likewise, the chief of staff of then-Rep. Marty Meehan (D-Mass.) admitted to having supervised some favorable rewrites of Meehan's Wikipedia biography while eliminating all traces of the promise that Meehan had made to serve only four terms in office.

Wikipedia's in-house statistics show that from June 2005 through December 2007, the Ahmadinejad profile was edited 5,742 times. A WikiScanner check reveals that the users were far-flung: Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Dubai, Hamburg, Haifa, Paris, Stockholm, multiple locations inside Iran, and one from within the CIA. On Dec. 15, 2005, at 11:38 a.m., someone at Langley scrolled to the paragraph in Ahmadinejad's biography about him running for president under the catchy slogan: "It's Possible and We Can Do It." He or she then typed a one-word addition to the text: "Wahhhhhh!"

Thirteen minutes later, Wiki user "Izehar" dutifully expunged "Wahhhhhh." Mission accomplished. Neutrality restored.

IN THE FALL OF 2006, Ahmadinejad tried to do some image repair during a news conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York. "I am not anti-Jew," he told reporters. "I respect them very much."

His declaration opened up a new front of debate among Wikipedians: What verb should be used to characterize Ahmadinejad's denial that he is anti-Semitic? Does "insist" imply a defensiveness that violates Neutral Point of View?

"It is best to use 'state' because it definitely has no connotation," argued "The Benham," a college student who describes himself as half Iranian, half "white American."