How Wikipedia changed Ajmal Kasab's birthday

As Mumbai reeled under shock, despair and anger over being attacked again on July 13, a message started clogging the jammed telephone networks and set the internet on fire. Though other information — another blast in Navi Mumbai, suspicious bag found in Santa Cruz — was also flying thick and fast, this one had the potential to spill mass anger onto the streets.

The blasts were apparently a ‘birthday gift’ for convicted 26/11 terrorist Ajmal Kasab, it said, and no less than Wikipedia said so.

The user-generated online encyclopaedia insists on verifibility, says Tinu Cherian, a Bangalore-based Wikipedia administrator: “It is all about verifiability, not necessarily of the truth, but whether readers and editors can check that the material has been published by a reliable source, and not whether they think it is true.” the resource has become a definitive go-to for unbiased information.

But on that fateful Wednesday, verifiability itself was the problem. Three sources — Indian Express (2009), IBNLive (2009) and Hindustan Times (2010) had mentioned Kasab’s date of birth (DoB) as September 13, 1987, while two — The Times of India (February 2011), The Hindu (2008) said it was on July 13 that year.

The entry on Kasab was created on November 29, 2008, three days after the attacks, and since December that year, his DoB has been mentioned as July 13.

No wonder then that when a Chennai-based user changed it to September 22 at 8.18pm (the last blast occurred at 7.05pm), there was consternation among Wikipedians, and minutes later, an ‘edit war’ as the community calls such rapid changes, had begun. Unable to verify the date, an administrator locked the page. 

Wikipedians say such problems are not uncommon, two recent cases being the rumour that freedom fighter Bhagat Singh was born on Valentine’s Day (February 14), and premature reports that West Bengal chief minister had died. Though there is no laid-down code, and no one in particular monitors changes to the database, the loosely organised community says it self-regulates and decisions are arrived at on case-to-case basis and actions depend on creating consensus. 

Soon after the edit war, a group of Wikipedians went into a huddle on the ‘Talk’ page of the website. Among them was Utkarsh Raj Atmaram, a 27-year-old Wikipedia administrator from Hyderabad.

Though he too had learnt about the controversy on Twitter, he was initially circumspect about the real date being July 13. However, when he checked the revision history of the article, he realised the truth was at best a shade of grey.

“Though the DoB had always been July 13, somewhere down the line the reference was deleted. This fuelled the confusion further,” Atmaram says.

A Washington Post blog later attributed a part of this confusion to: “Those who are making the Wikipedia entry changes [to September 13] are trying to delegitimise the terrorists behind the attack.”

It was finally decided at 11.26pm that both the dates should be reflected after one contributor, ‘kangzan’,  pointed out: “Right now Kasab’s birthday is both in September and in July at the same time, exactly like Schrodinger’s hypothetical cat is both dead and alive at the same time — a thought experiment used to illustrate physics’ aptly named uncertainty principle”. Later, when Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad chief Rakesh Maria confirmed the date to be September 13, the issue was laid to rest.

The incident highlights the fragile nature of ‘truth’ on the internet — Wikipedia doesn’t know something happened until a credible source doesn’t ratify it. “That is why, even though Twitter can be ahead of us in breaking news, we do not create articles based on what is said there,” Atmaram says. Perhaps that is why Kasab’s birth date being mentioned as July 13 on Wikipedia created such a furore  as people trust its content more than even conventional sources of information.

The flip side, however, especially in countries like India where only a fraction of government records are online, is a lot of information does not meet the encyclopaedia’s ‘notability factor’, which determines whether particular information can be added to the database. To circumvent the problem, Wikipedians in India are experimenting with a novel idea.

“We have started using oral citations for non-controversial content. A tayyam dance form has been documented using such citations of proponents,” says Cherian, who is also at the forefront of creating Wikipedia content in Indian languages.

As the dust settles on the debate, one thing is clear: Information wars of the future will be fought online, and in crises, what transpires between netizens will shape reality on the ground.