How censorship works on Wikipedia. On Digimag 65 the case of murdered Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=2096
On April 14, 2011 the Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni, member of the International Solidarity Movement, was kidnapped in Gaza. Author of the book “Gaza. Restiamo Umani”, translated into four languages, and collaborator of the newspaper “Il Manifesto”, Arrigoni was the only foreign reporter to describe on his blog Guerrilla Radio, started in 2008, the sufferance of Palestinian people living in Gaza. The day after, April 15, the shocking and unexpected news about his murder quickly spread on the web. In few hours the Wikipedia’s English version dedicated him a paragraph in “Army of Monotheism and Holy War”. In the meantime, a regularly registered user created on Wikipedia’s Italian version the entry ‘Vittorio Arrigoni’ as a template, “providing only basic biographical information”. There was no time to edit or improve the article because an administrator, called Guidomac, decided to delete it immediately. The page disappeared. Another user re-created it anonymously, but this time a patroller (a user responsible to check recent changes) decided that the article “should have been deleted outright”. On Wikipedia Village Pump many users questioned the decision and discussed whether the entry should be kept or not. An administrator proposed to “redirect it” – so the community could express an opinion by voting: “Articles to be deleted/Vittorio Arrigoni”. On Facebook, blogs and newspapers there were reactions of surprise and bewilderment, but things that Wikipedia deletes, or tries to delete, end up to be always amplified by the Net. The Italian activist’s life has been published everywhere as a sign of protest. It’s April 16. On the English version of Wikipedia users are already working on his biography, while on the Italian version an administrator suggests “to suspend the deletion process and wait for better times to come”. The entry remains there temporarily. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
