Terror victim's Wikipedia page deleted
The editors of Wikipedia's Hebrew edition voted to remove the page dedicated to Dafna Meir, who was murdered by a terrorist in her home in January; one of her children witnessed the murder.
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia founded in 2001, is edited by its users—tens of thousands of volunteers from all over the world. Users who prove especially active and contributory to the site are sometimes invited to be editors and receive expanded editing abilities on the site. Israel has about 700 such editors.
Among them there are 180 that belong to a more senior group, which decides if certain pages should be kept online or deleted. These are editors who have edited at least 100 pages in the preceding three months.
A page about Meir was created after her murder. Meir was an intensive care nurse who also ran a popular blog about women's fertility matters. The editors felt that Meir's status as a terror victim was not, on its own, a sufficient reason to include her in the online encyclopedia.
The logic behind this claim appears to be twofold: First, Wikipedia is not a memorial website, but an encyclopedia. Second, if Meir were to be given a page of her own, that may require – for reasons of fairness – that no other terror victim be denied the right to have a Wikipedia page.
On the other hand, there were editors who argued that Meir's death was especially impactful on Israeli society – as the circumstances of her death set her apart from most terror victims – and that dedicating a Wikipedia page to her is thus justified.
In the end, 39 editors voted to delete Meir's page, and 29 voted to keep it, leading to its deletion. Meir's widower, Natan, responded to the decision by saying, "First of all it's important to me to say that this is not my way of commemorating Dafna. To me, and to all of us, Dafna was a special person and not a page, so I don't see these things as personal."
Mr. Meir continued, "But I think this is their loss. Dafna (was a significant voice in) the conversation surrounding the topics of fertility and sexuality, especially among the religious public. Her blog had 150,000 visitors. It's obvious that had we had been fortunate to have Dafna still alive, her Wikipedia page would have written itself."
