User:Geo Swan

I started editing the English language wikipedia in October 2004. I started over 3,500 articles there, on a wide variety of topics, and made significant contributions to some other wikis.

I spent some time - at least several hundred hours, contributing to the ComplexOperations.org wiki. I see you have no entry for it, and I would be glad to describe my experience there. Short version - it was a wiki that used "semantic" extensions. Each wikilink could encode the relationship between the topic of the current article and the article being linked to. So, for example, the article on the Viking explorer Eric the Red could contain a link to the article on his son, Lief Ericson, that looked like [[Father of::Lief Ericson]]. Meanwhile, Lief Ericson's article would contain similar link, [[Son of::Eric the Red]] These would render as regular looking wikilinks, in the body of the article. But, at the end of the article there would be a list of the other articles the article linked to, or that linked to it, where a relationship had been stated, stating what the relationships were. That part was great. I liked that. However, no one ever added support for the usual templates there, and that was a huge drawback. In particular, there was no support for the {{cite}} templates. Oh. I am forgetting the most important thing. DARPA. The site did not rely on donations, or someone with deep pockets. Academics with ties to the Defense or Intelligence establishments paid for the site through DARPA grants.

My contributions on the wikipedia have triggered controversy. In March of 2005 I came across an article in the Washington Post about the habeas corpus hearing of a Guantanamo captive from Germany, named Murat Kurnaz. The DC area judges making rulings on these habeas corpus petitions all had security clearances. The petitions contained classified material that was called "evidence", and they were to review this material and prepare two versions of their rulings. A briefer, vaguer, unclassified ruling would be made available to the public. A full classified ruling was only supposed to be available to those who had the proper security clearance.

But a Washington Post reporter noticed that, due to a clerical error by a low-level clerk, the classified ruling the judge had prepared for Kurnaz had been published in the clear. They reported on some details from the classified version.

The judge, Joyce Hens Green, IIRC, had reviewed something like 100 pages of classified "evidence". She found that only a single page contained any allegations that would justify Kurnaz's detention - if it was to be taken at face value. However she felt she had to totally discount that single page as it was vague, undated, and unsigned. She had seen no record of who wrote it, or what it was based on.

So, I used this article to start the wikipedia article on Kurnaz. I also started the wikipedia article on Omar Khadr, a Canadian youth who was also known to be in Guantanamo. In 2005 the identity of the individuals in Guantanamo was kept secret.

But their names did become known. Sometimes some element of the Bush administration would reveal the identity of a captive, when someone wanted to make some kind of point about him. Sometimes their identity would become known, when their family published part of a letter they received. And some of their identities became known if they were lucky enough to be one of the 200 or so men released in the first couple of years of the camp.

I created some google news alerts, and I starte new wikipedia articles about every new captive to have news articles published about them. I started in March 2005, and by August 2005 I had started articles on several dozen men. Wikipedia inclusion standards were much looser in 2005. Initially none of those articles used references - something now considered essential in a wikipedia biography of a living person, because support for references had not been added to the system.

Then, in September 2005, I came across a page maintained by the Associated Press. Those habeas corpus documents? They had sought access to them through Freedom of Information Act requests, and had put the 58 "returns" the government had provided on that site. I started ploughing through them, one at a time, and summarizing what I found in new wikipedia articles.

At this point I had been contributing to the wikipedia for a bit more than ten months. I had made something like 2000 edits. And yet I was still a newbie. I made my contributions and hadn't learned much of how the wikipedia was run. I did not know that the wikipedia had an AFD process (Articles for deletion). I did not know the wikipedia had administrators, whose duties included closing those discussions.

Four of the recently created articles on Guantanamo captives were nominated for deletion on a single day. I scrambled to understand what this meant, and how to respond.

The wikipedia's initial success was accidental, and poorly understood. In my opinion it is naive to assume it will continue to be a success. In my opinion the wikipedia is not healthy, has what we would describe as an auto-immune disorder, if it were a living organism. In an auto-immune disorder a bodies defense mechanisms go over-active, and attack healthy tissue. Excema, arthritis, diabetes, are all auto-immune disorders. Auto-immune disorders can be deadly. And the wikipedia's autoimmune disorder can bring it down.

During those first four AFD I first encountered a user named Zoe. She turned out to be an administrator, one with a coterie of fans, who congratulated her for being a zealous vandal-fighter. But I wasn't a fan.

In one of those discussions she wrote that Guantanamo related topics were "inherently biased". She did not think the captives should be covered, at all, because those articles would only be used for "America-bashing".

Well, I was still a newbie, but I had read the core policies, on verifiability, neutrality, using reliable sources, and not introducing original research. I thought about what she had written, and asked her, how could a topic itself be "inherently biased"? Surely, the only thing that could be biased was how someone wrote about a topic? Surely, if contributors made enough effort to comply with those core policies, articles could be writtten that weren't biased?

Did the public ever learn what that single unreliable page about Kurnaz said? Yeah. Apparently it said that he had been friends with another German muslim who became a suicide bomber who blew himself up in Israel. It turned out that almost everything in the unsigned undated allegation page was wrong. Kurnaz was friends with this guy - they used to meet up in the dog park, to walk their dogs, but that is the only thing that was correct. Kurnaz's friend was not a suicide bomber. He was alive and well in Germany. And the bombing that the memo said happened in Israel? Never happened. German counter-intelligence officials did interview this guy, and gave him a clean bill of health. Kurnaz spent half a dozen years in Guantanamo. And when he was still in Bagram, GIs invited some German soldiers for a visit, and to beat the crap out of him.

You know what? I drafted additionals paragraphs describing my next fifteen years on the wikipedia. But I am snipping them to keep this of manageable length.

External links

• User:Geo Swan — user page at the English Wikipedia
• User talk:Geo Swan — user talk page at the English Wikipedia