A Woman Was Stabbed to Death on a Train. Wikipedia Wants to Erase Her Story.

 

Iryna Zarutska boarded the Lynx Blue Line of the Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail system on August 22 and began looking at her phone. She wore a hat and T-shirt, with trendy wire-rim glasses perched on her nose. Within moments, she had caught the attention of a man wearing a red hoodie seated behind her.

Minutes later, the man took a folded knife from his pocket, opened the blade, and stood over Zarutska, 23, who appeared to have no notion that those moments would be her last. The man who stabbed her, Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Those are the facts. But a number of Wikipedia editors don’t want you to know about the attack. Since the online encyclopedia’s article “Killing of Iryna Zarutska” was created on Saturday, Wikipedia editors have fought to have it deleted, as I wrote in a post on X.

“An editor has nominated this article for deletion,” says the text in a box near the top of the article with a red stripe running down the left.

It was another sign of how Wikipedia’s idealistic mission to provide all the world’s information for free has been compromised by editors who battle over their version of the truth. Last year, I wrote that the consensus achieved by all that jostling often lines up with the prerogatives of the Democratic Party and the media establishment that supports it. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has criticized the site as too left-wing.

Zarutska was a Ukrainian immigrant. Nearly three weeks after she was killed, the story broke not in the national news media, but on X. Surveillance footage of the killing began trending online, pinned to rocketing conversations about crime, race, and representation. As the story spread, it morphed from another crime statistic in urban America into a cultural flashpoint, one positioned by the right as an inverse to George Floyd: a white woman, murdered by a black man, and hardly anyone notices.

The story wasn’t just ignored. It was suppressed, at least by Wikipedia. That notion is reinforced by the twists and turns of the article about Zarutska, created by a user called YeraC. The initial statement about the attack was fairly straightforward: “Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was fatally stabbed by Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old homeless man with a lengthy criminal history. The incident drew significant attention due to Zarutska’s background as a refugee seeking safety in the United States and raised concerns about public safety on Charlotte’s public transportation system.”

Through the subsequent day’s worth of edits, the article identified Brown as a “34-year-old homeless black man with a lengthy criminal record dating back to 2011,” listing some of the crimes he had been convicted of, including robbery with a dangerous weapon, breaking and entering, and felony larceny.

But then the article began to shift. The description of Brown as “Black” was added and then removed in multiple rounds of edit volleying. So was the term career criminal. Brown’s name remained in the article’s lead as edit skirmishes played out around the question of whether to identify him as “black,” “Black,” or a “career criminal.” Other people argued about whether the body of the article should describe the incident as a killing or murder.

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