[Updates below]

Barack Obama's Wikipedia entry completely omits the president's "links" to former '60s radical William Ayers, Fox News reports. And it claims the entry contains only a fleeting reference to his controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

This epic coverup was first reported by WorldNetDaily reporter Aaron Klein, who noticed that edits adding references to Ayers and Wright, among other things, were quickly being undone by Wikipedia volunteers.

Klein found it particularly alarming that a Wikipedia user called "Jerusalem21" was recently hit with a three-day wiki-suspension after twice posting the neutral and encyclopedic fact that there are "some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S."

That was Sunday. Fox picked up Klein's explosive scoop Tuesday, noting in the first paragraph that — in contrast to Obama's entry — the Wikipedia "pages for Ayers and Wright are heavily peppered with references to the president."

That's meant as evidence that Obama's real and supposed links to the men are newsworthy enough to include in his bio. Fame relationships aren't symmetric, though. If Obama had cut me off in traffic in 1997, the incident would occupy half my Wikipedia entry, while I wouldn't get a footnote in his.

Of more interest is the identity of the mysterious Jerusalem21, whose courageous disregard of Wikipedia's ban on fringe material provided WND's Aaron Klein with his smoking gun in the first place, spawning what will soon be a national wiki-scandal.

Curiously, it turns out that Jerusalem21, whoever he or she might be, has only worked on one other Wikipedia entry since the account was created, notes ConWebWatch. That's Aaron Klein's entry, which Jerusalem21 created in 2006, and has edited 37 times.

Klein, who serves as WND's Jerusalem bureau chief, did not immediate respond to an e-mail Monday.

Update: March 10, 2009 | 1:40:00 PM

This morning the WorldNetDaily story, which is headlined "Wikipedia scrubs Obama eligibility," was scrubbed clean of the name Jerusalem21, who's now referred to only as "one Wikipedia user." Fortunately, Google cache never forgets.

Second update: March 10, 2009 | 7:20:00 PM

Aaron Klein has answered my e-mail. Klein says that there's an "undeniable trend" of Ayers and Wright references being scrubbed from Obama's entry — as he wrote in his article. But he now admits that he's responsible for the Jerusalem21 edits that he reported on, and says he's updated his WorldNetDaily story to reflect that.

I am not "Jerusalem21," but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama's page. I wanted to personally oversee whether indeed criticism of Obama was being deleted. For your information, often investigative journalists engage in exactly this kind of testing — like seeing if they can bypass mandatory disclosures while donating to a candidate (several newspapers did this prior to the November election), or if they can register a dog to vote in Illinois. Thus, even if I had personally edited Obama's page as a test to investigate allegations of scrubbing, this is entirely legitimate journalistic practice.

What's missing from this treatise on investigative journalism is the reporter's obligation to disclose when he's engineered events on which he's reporting. In a follow-up e-mail, Klein acknowledges that he should have made that disclosure, but suggests he's guilty of nothing more than an accidental omission in a hastily written story.

"It just slipped my mind," he writes.

Interesting. Let's look at some of the original text.

Indeed, multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from re-posting any material on the website for three days. In one example, Wikipedia user "Jerusalem21" added the following to Obama's page: "There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts." As is required on the online encyclopedia, that entry was backed up by third-party media articles, citing the Chicago Tribune and WorldNetDaily.com The entry was posted on Feb. 24, at 6:16 p.m. EST. Just three minutes later, the entry was removed by a Wikipedia administrator, claiming the posting violated the websites rules against "fringe" material. [...] When the user "Jerusalem21" tried to repost the entry about Obama's eligibility a second time, another administrator removed the material within two minutes and then banned the Wikipedia user from posting anything on the website for three days.

That's a lot of mind-slippage. You'd think at some point in the writing, Klein would have a revelation, slap his head and say, "Silly me! Here I am writing about my researcher following my instructions, and I'm making it sound like I don't even know the guy! Glad I caught that."

The only other example in Klein's article of a user being suspended from Wikipedia also traces back to a Jerusalem21 edit — this time about William Ayers. That example found its way into the Fox News report. But, similarly, Klein forgot to mention that it was the same user — his unnamed researcher — and the same ban: i.e., the one that followed two successive edits accusing Obama of falsifying his birth.

If he'd disclosed all that, it might have been a different article. "Man Fails to Get Crazy Conspiracy Theory Into Obama's Wikipedia Entry" is a story not even Fox would pick up.

Creative Commons photo courtesy John D. Resner

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