Wikipedia kept David Rohde kidnapping secret

THE New York Times worked with Wikipedia to keep news that one of its reporters had been kidnapped in Afghanistan off the online encyclopedia.

Times reporter David Rohde, who was kidnapped by the Taliban in November, escaped from his captors along with his translator this month.

A number of news organisations, including Agence France-Presse, at the request of the Times, agreed not to report the kidnapping out of concerns for their safety.

But keeping the news off Wikipedia was another matter, the Times said.

It said that on at least a dozen occasions, users posted news of the abduction on a Wikipedia page about Mr Rohde – only to have it erased.

Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing, it said.

“The sanitising was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at the Times,” the newspaper said.

“We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,” Mr Wales told the Times.

“I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.”

The Times said that two days after the November 10 kidnapping, Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at the Times and friend of Mr Rohde, altered Mr Rohde’s Wikipedia entry to emphasise that his work could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantanamo and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims.

It said that the next day, an unidentified user, citing an Afghan news agency report, edited the entry on Mr Rohde and mentioned the kidnapping.

Mr Moss deleted the mention, and the user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal, the Times said.

It said the Times eventually reached out to Mr Wales and Wikipedia put an indefinite block and then a temporary freeze on changes to the page.

“We had no idea who it was,” Mr Wales said of the unidentified user making the edits.

He said there was no indication the user had ill intent.

The Times said Mr Wales himself unfroze the page after the June 19 escape by Mr Rohde and his interpreter, Tahir Ludin.