If you’d prefer to read the original blog posts first, see Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

A few weeks ago — on Dec. 23rd, 2020, to be precise — we removed a three-part blog series we’d published about Wikipedia’s article on Nicholas Alahverdian, a Rhode Island child-welfare advocate who had reportedly died of cancer in February 2020. Like it or not, however, the removal of the series only made people more curious about Mr. Alahverdian, his Wikipedia-related activities (as well as his non-Wikipedia activities), and the circumstances of his alleged death. This has now culminated, directly or indirectly, in the publication of two articles by Tom Mooney of the Providence Journal, which were picked up by USA Today and Yahoo News, among others.

As we noted in our (now-deleted) explanation for the deletion, after posting the blog series we were almost immediately contacted by someone claiming to be Mr. Alahverdian’s widow, using a “throwaway” anonymous e-mail account. This person wrote voluminous e-mails threatening to sue us, our hosting company, and at least three other people who were once active on our site but are no longer involved with it in any kind of fiduciary or administrative capacity. Just to be on the safe side though, we removed the three blog entries. Unfortunately, in the meantime, more e-mails were sent by the same anonymous account to the Wikimedia Foundation, falsely (and rather ludicrously) accusing us and various Wikipedia users who had edited the Alahverdian article of extortion, “property damage,” and threatening physical violence. One of these accusations (all of which were clearly libelous) was even mentioned in the first Providence Journal article.

After we responded to the anonymous account to point out that e-mailing libelous false claims about identifiable individuals is illegal, a new “security notice” suddenly appeared on

…continue reading The Nicholas Alahverdian Story: Epilogue