A little over a year ago (Dec. 14, 2020), we ran a series of three blog posts (plus an Epilogue, as well as a forum thread) about a somewhat-obscure Rhode Island man named Nicholas Alahverdian, who in spite of his recent “death” was apparently still editing the Wikipedia article he’d authored about himself several years earlier. The article highlighted his activities as a child-welfare advocate and an outspoken critic of Rhode Island’s Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), an agency he claimed had victimized him as a child by sending him off to abusive out-of-state foster-care facilities.

Other Wikipedians, for the most part, were persuaded that the various accounts doing the editing were operated by former associates of his, and that they were maintaining his biography in order to “continue the fight” against a corrupt and uncaring DCYF bureaucracy. Unfortunately for Mr. Alahverdian, the fact that he was still alive posed a serious problem. He might be recognized on the street (perhaps even by a “super-recogniser”), photographed, and/or background-checked by someone who might ultimately take issue with the fact that he was also an alleged sex offender, fraudster, swindler, and identity thief.

And so, after his Feb. 29, 2020 death announcement, Wikipedians were told that the biography was being maintained not to glorify him or support the continuation of his work, but rather to smear and libel him, and that it should therefore be deleted. And indeed, several of the sources linked to in the article had already mysteriously disappeared into 404-land, probably because non-Wikimedia websites tend to be much more responsive to emotional appeals — and if those don’t work, legal threats. But Wikipedians almost never delete articles at the subject’s request (and really, how else would they maintain power over them?), so Mr. Alahverdian did what many ethically-challenged people might have done in such an unusual situation: He downloaded a photograph of someone else from the internet, “flipped” it horizontally in a photo editing program, and uploaded it to Wikipedia to replace the photograph of himself that had been used to illustrate his article for the past several years.

The problem with this strategy was that there’s really only one reason someone would do that, and sure enough, that was the reason.

Not Much Smarter than the Average Bear

As it happens, Mr. Alahverdian was unfamiliar with This Person Does Not Exist, a website that produces a unique photo-like image of a non-existent person every time someone visits it. Instead, he used a photograph of a real, living person — someone who just happened to be a mid-level employee of the US State Department. A bad idea to be sure, but Alahverdian (using a sock-puppet account) doubled down, insisting that the man in the photograph was really him, and that the obvious differences in appearance were due to physical deterioration caused by the “illness” that ultimately led to his “death” (though the man in the photo looked perfectly healthy). Several Wikipedians were apparently persuaded by this ploy as well, and the phony photo appeared in the article for several months.

Unfortunately for Mr. Alahverdian, it was fairly easy to run a reverse-image search on the photograph (something he might also have been unfamiliar with) to determine who the replacement photo subject actually was. That search wasn’t done by Wikipedians, though; Wikipedians are bound and determined to “assume good faith” in such situations. Instead, it was done by a Wikipediocracy member, who then brought it to the attention of other Wikipediocracy members, leading inevitably to the aforementioned three blog posts (plus Epilogue, etc.).

To their credit though, most Wikipedians actually declined to condemn us for doing something they probably should have done themselves as a matter of routine, if not common sense.

And now?

Last week, press reports began to appear describing how Mr. Alahverdian was apprehended in a hospital in Scotland, where he had sought treatment for a serious case of COVID-19. It appears that he avoided being moved from the hospital to a police lockup because of his illness, and the local authorities even allowed him to post bail — probably because they didn’t want to take responsibility for his medical care. A local woman claiming to be his wife then bailed him out and brought him home to her flat in Glasgow. When he then failed to appear for a preliminary hearing a few days later, police raided the flat and arrested him, “huckling” him into a police van and off to the local constabulary.

As of now, this is still a developing story. Just in the time it’s taken to write all this, we’ve learned that Mr. Alahverdian spent some time in Ireland, where he managed to obtain a driver’s license under the name “Nicholas Brown,” before moving to Scotland. (He also apparently organized a “long con” swindle of Canadian TV personality and vegan-cheese entrepreneur Nafsika Antypas.) Once in Scotland, he told anyone who asked that his name was “Arthur Knight” and that he was a “visiting professor” from Bristol. Crucially, he’d tried to have his arm tattoos removed — but unfortunately for him, the removal procedure didn’t completely succeed, and what was left could still be used to identify him. Nevertheless, upon being re-arrested, he claimed not to be Nicholas Alahverdian at all (or Nicholas Rossi, as some seem to prefer) at an arraignment hearing. That also proved unsuccessful though, as he was denied further release on bail.

Few Wikipediocracy members expressed surprise at any of this, having already witnessed his narcissistic behavior and his general contempt for the intelligence of others first-hand. Still, it may have been somewhat curious that he ultimately chose to hide in the United Kingdom, if only because UK streets are monitored by more police CCTV cameras than those of almost any other non-totalitarian state in the world. (Perhaps he wasn’t aware of that, either.)

We’re not complaining, but…

Journalists don’t like to credit blogs or forum sites with “scoops.” That’s understandable, since blogs and forums aren’t held to the same professional journalistic standards as they are and are often inaccurate, if not flat-out wrong. Perhaps more importantly, newspapers can be sued for what they publish, whereas most interactive websites generally can’t be, since they’re protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act… at least in the United States. So while we don’t pretend to operate at the pro-journalist level, we still do a considerable amount of fact-checking here, and we rarely-if-ever go in for sensationalist headlines, unsupportable claims, or “gossip” if there’s any serious doubt about our findings.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that we published this story a month before it appeared anywhere else. So, naturally it’s disappointing that the various journalistic entities covering it have either chosen to ignore that fact, or simply haven’t taken the trouble to look it up. And we probably wouldn’t even mention it, except that when we did publish the story in December 2020, Mr. Alahverdian quite literally freaked out, using a false identity to send voluminous e-mails containing outrageously false and libelous claims about our conduct, and also threatening to sue us, our hosting company, and several people who are no longer affiliated with the site but were named by him because they still appeared in Google searches for the term “Wikipediocracy.”

We didn’t start out with any particular animosity towards Mr. Alahverdian, nor did we know that police in Rhode Island, and apparently the FBI as well, already suspected that Alahverdian was still alive. How could we? Initially, most of us assumed that he really was dead, and of course there were no public records of his having a wife or children who might be upset by our story, since such persons didn’t exist. Even when the threats and false accusations started to appear in our e-mail boxes, we weren’t really afraid of being sued, because it had since become obvious that Alahverdian himself was the one making the threats, and judges don’t usually allow civil cases to be filed by people who don’t exist. But there’s a first time for everything, and we did have to convince our hosting company that the threats were bogus, which was a hassle. Hosting companies don’t like it when things like that happen, and really, who would?

To put it simply, we didn’t mind taking one for the team, but it would just be a little nicer if the team took the trouble to acknowledge our existence after our having done so.

Looking Ahead

Mr. Alahverdian’s future is now very much in doubt, though at this point his chances of lying his way out of trouble (i.e., prison) are very slim.

What does all this tell us about Wikipedia, though? Obviously on the most basic level, it tells us that if someone commits crimes and might end up in the position of having to fake his/her own death and flee overseas to avoid prosecution, they’d be better off not posting an autobiography on Wikipedia, or at least not spending years trying to do so in the face of multiple deletions due to poor sourcing and dubious notability. But that’s not because posting an autobiography is a crime in itself; rather, it’s because most Wikipedians don’t cooperate with people who are trying to disappear. (They don’t cooperate with people who aren’t trying to disappear, either.) But all that could said for just about anybody.

There’s also the standard point we make in nearly all of our blog posts, which is that even after 20 years of existence, it’s still too easy for Wikipedia to be manipulated by clever and/or tenacious bad actors, even when those bad actors aren’t particularly well-versed on the rules, or even particularly skilled at lying. The “notability” bar is still too low, and while the Biographies of Living Persons (BLP) policy didn’t necessarily apply in this case after Alahverdian declared himself dead, those rules are still too weak, not to mention unclear in cases where the life-status of the subject is in question.

Some may argue that Wikipedia played a positive role in this story, by providing an alleged criminal and hyper-narcissist with an irresistible platform for self-aggrandizement — one that was (and is) so convoluted and difficult to navigate, it caused him to make a series of errors that acted as a means for investigators to apprehend him. To some extent that’s probably true, and to be fair, helping to catch alleged criminals is not entirely outside the purview of a general reference work. But the overall effect of incidents like this is to make Wikipedia seem vulnerable and easy to manipulate, at a time when Wikipedia is already under pressure to make good on its PR-campaign promises to be a “bulwark” against online disinformation.

Still, Wikipedia has been fortunate in this case. As mentioned earlier, despite our having “broken” the Nicholas Alahverdian story, the news media has largely ignored our role in it, which means they’ve also ignored Wikipedia’s role in it. If the wiki-folks are lucky, that will continue to be the case. After all, many (indeed, most) journalists don’t like to subject Wikipedia to negative coverage if they can avoid it. Perhaps that’s because they assume Wikipedia is too popular with their readers and subscribers, but it may also be because they use it the same way everyone else does, and they don’t want to denigrate something that makes their jobs easier by, say, allowing them to quickly get background info on a subject like “Nicholas Alahverdian” just by copy-pasting his name into Google and clicking on the first thing that comes up. That’s understandable, but… it’s also not especially good.

(We’ll try to keep updating this post as circumstances warrant, but to be honest, the really funny stuff is in the forum thread.)