State Department Cleans Dell’s Wiki Log of Controversial Material

US Ambassador to Pristina Christopher Dell’s hands-on involvement in selecting two new presidents for the country has been erased from his Wikipedia page by a computer registered to the State Department, Balkan Insight has discovered.

Earlier this month, Ambassador Dell led three-way talks between political parties to find a solution to the latest institutional crisis, caused by a court decision which ruled that the election of Behgjet Pacolli had been unconstitutional.

Pacolli, billionaire businessman and head of the governing New Kosovo Alliance, AKR, said in an interview that the name of the newly elected president, Atifete Jahjaga, was theatrically put for- ward by Dell in a sealed envelope.

Dell had also found himself at the centre of controversy following Pacolli’s election to president.

SMSs between Pacolli and his advisor, referencing the US Ambassador’s involvement in negotiations to secure a majority for the AKR man, appeared in various newspapers, leading to a barrage of complaints that the US was meddling in internal politics and jokes about how the president was being elected “by SMS”.

This criticism spilled over onto Wikipedia, where individuals with IPs, the unique number which identifies your computer and location, registered in Kosovo quickly began to change his register to include the tongue-in-cheek position of the “Royal Highness of the Republic of Kosovo” and claim he specialised in voodoo. He was, they wrote, capable of creating a president “by writing a text message and pulling another [...] out of an envelope”.

Wikipedia moderators were quick to remove the more bizarre claims, but, Balkan Insight found, it was an IP address registered to the US State Department which cleaned away all references to Dell’s involvement in the selection of both president.

The person also removed a link to a diplomatic cable written to Ambassador Dell and made public by Wikileaks.
Balkan Insight asked the State Department whether the person had been operated in their professional capacity and whether it had a policy of cleaning its employees’ online entries for controversial information.

A department of State Official would only say: “The nature of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it.”