Where ignorant armies clash

We will go to war,8221; reads the ungrammatical email, 8220;after we have build our army, equipped it, trained... so if you want to win this war help us build our army.8221;

We will go to war,8221; reads the ungrammatical email, 8220;after we have build our army, equipped it, trained8230; so if you want to win this war help us build our army.8221; 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 would8230; retake virtual territory for 8220;accuracy and impartiality8221; by keeping 8220;Israel-related articles8230; from being tainted by anti-Israel editors.8221;

Behind the clandestine Wiki-editing effort apparently stood the Committee for Accuracy on Middle East Reporting in America, CAMERA, the hawkish watch-dog group that8230; attacks what it regards as biased reporting on Israel in the mainstream media8230;

Ineffectual as the CAMERA effort apparently was, there are several morals to the story. One is that despite the techno-idealism that Wikipedia can inspire, it8217;s best to approach it with an attitude of caveat lector, let the reader beware. The affair is also a reminder that CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media. And8230; it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy8230; In the meantime, a raging debate on the affair ensued among Wikipedia administrators8230; Eventually, one of the participants mentioned in the original emails, nicknamed 8220;dajudem,8221; said 8220;I don8217;t see what the big deal is8230;8221; The group 8220;was simply there to make sure that the pro-Israel point of view was represented.8221;

To a degree, dajudem is right. People like Wikipedia because it8217;s free and vast, and because it8217;s open-source: a community, not a corporation. But the encyclopaedia8217;s two basic qualities 8212; it provides information to millions of people, and it is written and edited by anonymous volunteers 8212; make it an obvious battleground for political conflicts8230; Wikipedia8217;s 8220;about8221; page describes the encyclopaedia as aiming for balance through consensus. But consensus isn8217;t the same as accuracy, and there is no consensus on an issue like the history of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Each side has a 8220;correct8221; story of the past8230; Scholarly and journalistic accounts that challenge the standard narratives are likely to get attacked from all sides, and a random reader won8217;t know which way the battle has shifted today. On Wikipedia there8217;s no byline to aid the reader8217;s judgment8230; Let the reader beware.

Excerpted from Gershom Gorenberg8217;s 8216;The Mideast editing wars8217; in the current issue of The American Prospect