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The overall effect of incidents like the Nicholas Alahverdian case is to make Wikipedia seem as vulnerable and easy to manipulate as ever, at a time when Wikipedia is already under pressure to make good on its PR-campaign promises to be a “bulwark” against online disinformation. …continue reading The Nicholas Alahverdian Story Update 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 A case study in Wikipedia failure by Dahlia Raven (see also: Part One; Part Three; Epilogue) Why does Nicholas Alahverdian have a Wikipedia entry at all? The simple answer is that an editor named Tkfy7cf created it. Not as “Nicholas Alahverdian,” but as “Nicholas Alahverdian I” (note the “I”). It was started on 14 November 2019, fully formed and including a photograph. On Wikipedia, that in itself is usually considered suspicious, so it was only a matter of minutes before it was moved to the correct title, and then immediately nominated for deletion. The deletion discussion was closed with a very lukewarm keep: The result was keep. I see that there are concerns about sockpuppetry in this discussion, but on the substance it seems like the various GNG-based claims of notability have been only weakly contested even if the “Harvard University alumnus” notability claim has not gained much acceptance. The BLP1E point is somewhat less clear but it hasn’t received enough support to make a deletion consensus. There will very likely be another deletion discussion and another chance to debate the merits of Alahverdian’s article, but let’s examine one of the non-sockpuppet comments, if only because it’s so terribly misguided: Keep. He was also an author who attended Harvard University He wrote: Dreading and Hoping All He was also published in the Providence Journal. Seems to have non-trivial coverage. Quebec Tribune, and again Quebec News Tribune. My opinion is non-trivial SIGCOV exists. It is concentrated on the East coast, New England, but that is not a concern for our guidelines. Lightburst (talk) 21:42, 14 November 2019 (UTC) Alahverdian is an author; a self-published author.He did attend Harvard, and was “administratively withdrawn,” as covered in Part One of this series.He was published in the Providence Journal. It was …continue reading The Nicholas Alahverdian Story, Part Two |
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