July 13 or September 13? Kasab’s birthday spurs Wikipedia war
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At the time of Wednesday’s bombings in Mumbai, crowd-sourcing encyclopedia Wikipedia had listed Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab’s birthday as July 13, 1987, attributing the date to a newspaper article written just days after the 26/11 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Another story purported to describe how the only attacker captured alive by police celebrated his 22nd birthday in Mumbai’s Arthur Road jail on September 13.
However, around an hour and a half after Wednesday’s attacks, the birth date was changed in the biographical text on Wikipedia to September 22, 1987, although the July 13 date was left under his photograph, according to the entry’s history page.
Minutes later, the next revision changed the date under the photograph to September 13.
Minutes after that, a Wikipedia contributor identified the changes as online 'vandalism' and changed the date back to July, the Wall Street Journal reports.
By then, of course, many newspapers had picked up the birthday story and Twitter spread it quickly as well.
The edits continue today, although now they seem to be all made by regular contributors under their account names, as opposed to several of Wednesday’s changes that were made anonymously and listed just IP addresses.
Currently, Kasab’s birthday is shown as '13 September 1987 (age 23) or 13 July 1987 (age 24)'.
Kasab has been sentenced to death for attacking Mumbai and killing 166 people on November 26, 2008, along with nine Pakistani terrorists.
He was found guilty of 80 offences, including waging war against the nation, which is punishable by the death penalty.
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