Gershom Gorenberg reports on an attempt to deliberately shift the tone of Wikipedia articles on the middle east:
"We will go to war," reads the ungrammatical email, "after we have build our army, equipped it, trained… so if you want to win this war help us build our army."
The language, fortunately, is figurative. According to that email and others, the members of a secret cell of nationalist operatives were expected only to edit, not to explode. Their battleground in the great Israeli-Arab Narrative War would be Wikipedia, where they would heroically struggle to retake virtual territory for "accuracy and impartiality" by keeping "Israel-related articles… from being tainted by anti-Israel editors." For instance, they'd rename the article on the "2006 Lebanon War," making it the "2006 Israel-Hezbollah War," thereby eliminating the calumny "that this war was conducted against Lebanon." (Never mind the impact on Lebanon as a whole, or the fact that the Israeli government itself named that conflict the Second Lebanon War.)
Read the rest and comment here. And subscribe to our RSS feed here to get our articles as soon as they're published.
--The Editors
