We will go to war,” reads the ungrammatical email, “after we have build our army, equipped it, trained... so if you want to win this war help us build our army.” 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 would... retake virtual territory for “accuracy and impartiality” by keeping “Israel-related articles... from being tainted by anti-Israel editors.”

Behind the clandestine Wiki-editing effort apparently stood the Committee for Accuracy on Middle East Reporting in America, CAMERA, the hawkish watch-dog group that... attack[s] what it regards as biased reporting on Israel in the mainstream media...

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, it’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. And... it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy... In the meantime, a raging debate on the affair ensued among Wikipedia administrators... Eventually, one of the participants mentioned in the original emails, nicknamed “dajudem,” [said] “I don’t see what the big deal is...” The group “was simply there to make sure that the pro-Israel point of view was represented.”

To a degree, dajudem is right. People like Wikipedia because it’s free and vast, and because it’s open-source: a community, not a corporation. But the encyclopaedia’s two basic qualities — it provides information to millions of people, and it is written and edited by anonymous volunteers — make it an obvious battleground for political conflicts... Wikipedia’s “about” page describes the encyclopaedia as aiming for balance through consensus. But consensus isn’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 “correct” story of the past... Scholarly and journalistic accounts that challenge the standard narratives are likely to get attacked from all sides, and a random reader won’t know which way the battle has shifted today. On Wikipedia there’s no byline to aid the reader’s judgment... Let the reader beware.

Excerpted from Gershom Gorenberg’s ‘The Mideast editing wars’ in the current issue of The American Prospect

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