Word War III

By April 2007, "state" had given way to "said," which, in turn, had become problematic. "I strongly doubt that he was sincere when he said he respects the Jews . . .

As such, we should avoid the POV that he is sincere about this quote by replacing 'said' with 'claimed' since this is less POV wording," stated/said/claimed "Sefringle," another college student, who identifies himself as "an atheist of African American and Jewish ethnicity."

Each side dragged out third-party sources to bolster its argument that Ahmadinejad is or is not anti-Semitic. The combatants were beginning to sound like bickering spouses trapped in a bad marriage.

"But my question was directed at you. Could you please respond?"

"I'll do that as soon as I get an answer to my question."

"Holocaust denial alone qualifies as antisemitism, so with that whitewash alone you only discredit yourself."

"What the hell are you even talking about?"

The fireworks were spectacular, but largely unproductive. As one Wiki editor put it: "There is no way I will get involved with working on this train wreck of an article. However, I do plan to sit back and enjoy the show."

Roozbeh Pournader, the man who'd unwittingly started the whole conflict, wasn't even following it anymore. He'd dropped out soon after Ahmadinejad's inauguration and was still trying to find a way to leave Iran.

When text vandalism or edit warring gets ugly, an administrator can protect an article by temporarily restricting access to, say, only registered Wikipedia users with confirmed accounts. In extreme circumstances, an admin will block all users. The Ahmadinejad article underwent 15 lockdowns, lasting from only a few days to two months. They were initiated or terminated by 20 different admins.

Finally, on May 20, 2007, "Pejman47," an Ahmadinejad defender, submitted an online request for help to the mediation committee. Fifteen other equally frustrated Wikipedians signed an agreement to take part. Wiki mediation is a nonbinding attempt at conflict resolution, usually conducted by e-mail or via a group talk page.

The Ahmadinejad case was assigned to Chad Horohoe, a business-math major at Virginia Commonwealth University and acting chairman of the English Wikipedia mediation committee. He had worked on a handful of earlier mediations, one of them a mixed-results marathon that involved the article about stock guru Robert Prechter and the Elliott wave principle of market forecasting. He wasn't overly optimistic about brokering an Ahmadinejad peace.

"Most mediations are not easy," Horohoe said. "Because you've got people who have their opinions for whatever reason, and, as people are, they're ingrained in their positions."

He began by asking the participants to vote on whether they wanted to proceed privately or on the public talk page. They opted for the latter. He asked each of them to post a summary of what he or she wanted to accomplish in mediation and suggestions for compromise. Then Horohoe took a leave of absence from the mediation committee. Well, what do you expect? He's a college kid, not a U.N. diplomat.

Horohoe said "a combination of things" pulled him away: other Wiki responsibilities (he helps debug and tweak the encyclopedia software), school, an internship with the city of Richmond's department of information technology.

The process started all over again in late July 2007, this time with a Glasgow, Scotland, college student named "Anthony" serving as mediator. He got everyone to agree on the main issues in search of solution: what points to cover in the Ahmadinejad article introduction, the question of whether to include an Iranian government response to the "wiped off the map" speech, alleged deviations from Neutral Point of View and the use of some questionable sources.

Then Anthony took a leave of absence from Wikipedia for undisclosed personal reasons. Mediator No. 3 picked up the baton last September. He wasn't a college student -- yet. Daniel Bryant, then 17, was a high school senior from Adelaide, Australia. He had some related experience, having successfully mediated the Wiki biography of Abu Usamah, an imam in Britain with a low tolerance for non-Muslims.

"It's more complex than the average case," Bryant said in a phone interview about the Ahmadinejad altercation. "On a scale of one to 10, it's about an eight."

The undercurrent of religion was a complicating factor, he explained. So, too, were the large number of people active in the dispute. On the other hand, a lot of those people were seasoned Wiki pros, some of them respected admins. Take "Avraham," an actuary. He'd contributed 388 edits to the Wikipedia article on circumcision, a hot-button subject.

"It was a very difficult topic," Bryant said, "and he was very calm."

AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT, there are approximately a dozen articles in various stages of mediation and arbitration on English Wikipedia. That's a pittance considering the gargantuan size of the site. One can argue that, by and large, it's a remarkably peaceful global village. But things can, and do, go wrong.

The most publicized Wikipedia system failure hinged on a solitary malicious edit. In May 2005, a Wiki contributor in Nashville sabotaged the biography of John Seigenthaler Sr., a former publisher of the Nashville Tennessean and the founding editorial director of USA Today. Four sentences of tainted text were introduced, one of which read, "For a short time, [Seigenthaler] was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby."

Seigenthaler had not only worked for Robert Kennedy, but he'd been a pallbearer at his funeral. The bogus bio remained online for four months, until someone discovered the tampering. Afterward, Seigenthaler had several conversations with Jimmy Wales about the lack of oversight and fact-checking on Wikipedia. What he heard wasn't reassuring.

"They don't want a code of ethics," says Seigenthaler, who has since started proofreading his Wikipedia entry several times a week. "It's not intellectual democracy. It's intellectual anarchy."

Like Seigenthaler, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sange also came to believe that the site's laissez-faire ethos borders on irresponsibility. Last year, Sanger started Citizendium, a free online encyclopedia that he refers to as "Wikipedia for adults." Citi's 3,000 contributors operate under their real names, and Sanger handpicks 300 editors with defined areas of expertise to ride herd on articles in development. Last month, Google unveiled a service called Knol, short for "a unit of knowledge," which will also compete with Wikipedia. People who write articles for Knol can choose whether to let others edit them, making it less collective and tamer than Wikipedia. The same is true for Citizendium.

Citizendium has a 423-word entry on Ahmadinejad that makes no reference to anti-Semitism or his speech to the World Without Zionism conference. The site has nothing to say about navel lint, exploding whales or the kitchen sink. There are only about 7,500 articles on Citizendium. That's about how many entries get purged from Wikipedia every four days for being obsolete or too off-the-wall.

IN SEPTEMBER LAST YEAR, Ahmadinejad gave a speech at Columbia University that made headlines for his take on Persian homosexuality. "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country," he declared. "We don't have that in our country . . . We don't have this phenomenon; I don't know who's told you that we have it."

That performance lit up the Ahmadinejad discussion board, right at the time young Daniel Bryant was hoping to conduct his mediation free of background noise. Some new Wiki editors appeared on the discussion page, bearing nuggets of offbeat information. "Marksspitel" wondered if there was room in the article for his contention that Iran does more sex-change operations than any other country except Thailand, and that government funding for the procedure has increased during Ahmadinejad's presidency. Another Wiki user wanted to see more on Ahmadinejad's religious beliefs, especially a dream the Iranian president supposedly had had that Armageddon would arrive "within three years."

Some people from the mediation group got sucked back into the general-discussion whirlpool. Bryant moved to stop that, posting a pointed message: "I would appreciate it if parties could comment on the two proposals currently floating around on the [mediation] page, rather than devoting their efforts into edit-warring . . . If any party does not wish for the mediation to continue, they can withdraw and the [mediation] will be closed." That's a 17-year-old Wikipedian with some adult backbone.

Bryant had launched his mediation effort by asking the 16 primary participants to divide into two camps, each with a designated spokesman. They declined. He then requested that every person list the sentences in the article they most objected to, and give reasons why.

Pejman47 wanted to add an update about "the media fuss" over Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University. Avraham, the circumcision authority, argued that Columbia was of fleeting significance. However, he wondered, what is Ahmadinejad's gas rationing plan doing in the article?

"We should have something in the lead about who he actually is and what he's done . . . and not limit it to just controversy surrounding him," explained "Omegatron."

Wikipedia business proceeds at its own quirky pace: Consensus Time. It reportedly took four years and input from 500 contributors to get the biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt into acceptable shape. "If some extra time is needed to work out a neutral version that parties can agree to, so be it," Avraham reminded everyone. "Wikipedia will be here for decades and more, we hope."

The cavalry finally arrived in the form of one lone rider. "Mcorazao" quietly joined the online mediation late last October. There was no Wikipedia profile for him. Beyond professing some familiarity with Spanish Wikipedia, he was a mysterious stranger.

"I think this issue is still being approached from the wrong perspective," Mcorazao declared in an Oct. 23 message. "Particularly in the intro, I think it is best to focus on the quotes and interpretations which are widely agreed to . . ." He posted a compromise rewrite of the long, thorny third paragraph that dealt with Ahmadinejad's "wiped off the map" remark and the charges of anti-Semitism. It was greeted with silence from fellow mediation participants.

Ten days later, Mcorazao took another crack at massaging the same block of Ahmadinejad text:

"He has been widely quoted as calling for the dissolution of the state of Israel and its government which he does not regard as legitimate or representative of the population. Like many in the Muslim world he has called for 'free elections' in the region giving the Palestinians a stronger voice in the region's future. One of his most notorious statements was one in which, according to some translations, he called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map,' but interpretations of this statement vary widely. He has also been condemned for describing the Holocaust as a myth to make 'the innocent nation of Palestine pay,' leading to accusations of anti-Semitism. In response to these criticisms, Ahmadinejad said, 'No, I am not anti-Jew, I respect them very much.' "

Poetry it's not. But something about that wording hit the right conciliatory note. Or maybe the combatants simply were worn out. "I like what you've done there, avoiding alarmist words and smears, while covering his rhetoric," wrote "Palestine Remembered."

Pejman47 was uncomfortable with attributing "notorious statements" to Ahmadinejad. Too judgmental. He suggested substituting "criticized statements."

Done.

Someone else homed in on the Ahmadinejad quote fragment "to make 'the innocent nation of Palestine pay.' " "Flagrant Neutral Point of View violation," he said. How about scratching that line?"

Done.

The remaining details were quickly ironed out. On Nov. 22, 2007, Bryant announced the mediation was a success and unlocked the Ahmadinejad biography, leaving a note on the discussion forum: "This page has been unprotected . . . Cheers."

IN THE MONTHS SINCE BRYANT UNLOCKED THE AHMADINEJAD ENTRY, there have been signs that the consensus he forged might not last. In May, "Rosywounds" griped that the article is "bloated beyond belief," while promising to take it upon himself to beef up the foreign policy section. "Shalom Freedman" wanted to revisit the threat Ahmadinejad presents to American democracy and Israel.

"Can an article lead be worked on, and argued about, and mediated, and still be written poorly and not very informative?" asked "BoogaLouie."

More experienced editors encouraged BoogaLouie to proceed with caution before doing any rewriting. On Memorial Day, Pejman47, the Ahmadinejad defender who requested a mediator, briefly returned to action. He sounded battle-fatigued.

"The current lead, although not perfect, is the result of a long 'painful mediation,' " he wrote. "Please, review the discussion . . . . Unfortunately, the other guys at the previous mediation and I don't have time for repeating the same reasoning again and again and again."

As for Roozbeh Pournader, he says the Ahmadinejad entry covers the politics well but fails to explore the Iranian leader's hero status in much of the Muslim world. He has no desire to edit the entry. He's just happy that he's no longer living under Ahmadinejad's rule. In February, he and his wife left Iran and moved to California, where he is working for a Silicon Valley tech company.

Pournader says he finds his adopted country "surprising" in many ways. The level of choice is daunting. In Iran, "you want to buy a car," he says, "there were only two cars you could afford, there were only three colors you could choose." In America, that most Wikipedian of nations, there are so many makes and models. So much information at your fingertips. Sometimes, he says, it's too much.

Tom Dunkel is a freelance writer who lives in Baltimore. He can be reached at tom@tomdunkel.com.