Department of Justice banned from Wikipedia

Wikipedia has temporarily blocked edits from the US Department of Justice after someone inside the government agency tried to erase references to a particularly-controversial Wiki-scandal.

Early last week, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) was accused of organizing a secret campaign to influence certain articles on the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit”. Just days later, the DoJ’s IP range was used to edit the site’s entry on the Pro-Israel “media-monitoring group,” lifting a new section that detailed the controversy.

The DoJ did not respond to our requests for comment. But odds are, the edits were made by a single individual acting independently. Wikipedia’s ban on the department’s IP is due to be lifted today.

On April 21, the Pro-Palestine site Electronic Intifada published a series of emails in which CAMERA Senior Research Analyst Gilead Ini seems to enlist volunteers to help “keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors”. Ini asks these volunteers to avoid forwarding his emails to the news media and invites them onto a Google Group called “Isra-pedia.”

In an email to The Reg, Ini declined to say if the messages published by Electronic Intifada were genuine, but he acknowledged that CAMERA recently ran an email campaign meant to promote edits that “ensure accuracy” on certain Wikipedia articles.

Electronic Intifada
On the alleged Isra-pedia thread – also published by Electronic Intifada – one longtime Wikipedia editor gives volunteers a primer on how to become a site administrator. “There is in Wikipedia the ability by an administrator to set significant limits on other editor [sic],” he writes. “One or more of you who want to take this route should stay away from any Israel realted [sic] articles for month [sic] until they [sic] interact in a positive way with 100 Wikipedia editors who would be used later to vote you as an administrator.”

This Wikipedia editor, known as “Zeq,” and several others involved with the CAMERA emails were subsequently sanctioned. Some were barred from editing topics involving the Arab-Israeli conflict, and at least one – “Gni,” believed to be Ini – was banned from the site entirely.

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