Blogger outs Azerbaijani Wikipedia editors over deleted articles

An Azerbaijani blogger has revealed the identities of Azerbaijani Wikipedia contributors, and is demanding they restore 3,000 deleted articles about Azerbaijani soldiers killed in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.

On 11 September, self-identified techno-blogger Farid Pardashunas began a series of Facebook posts in which he urged Wikipedia editors to restore the deleted articles. He also threatened to send the personal information of those who deleted said articles to the Azerbaijani State Security Service.

Pardashunas claimed that these articles were important to the families of the soldiers who fought in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and that deleting them would harm the nation. 

He has since been publishing daily posts identifying people as Wikipedia contributors responsible for the articles’ deletion, beginning with Aykhan Zayedzadeh, whom he accused of ‘treason’.

Zayedzadeh later posted on X that he was being targeted over the creation of an article which he did not author about Bahruz Samadov, a researcher detained on charges of treason in late August.

One of the contributors responsible for writing the articles told OC Media that the articles were created after the end of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War to document Azerbaijani casualties in the absence of official information.

They decided to delete the articles because they did not adhere to Wikipedia’s guidelines, which stipulated that articles about soldiers could only be published if they had received ‘the country’s highest state award or held a high rank or military position’.

They said that two websites were later launched in 2021 to document the dead Azerbaijani soldiers based on information documented in the Wikipedia articles.

After this transfer was completed, the group decided to delete the original Wikipedia articles, except for those soldiers who had received Azerbaijan’s highest state award or who had the highest rank.

‘In June of this year, a discussion was opened on Wikipedia, and it was decided to delete the articles. After that, Aykhan did this, because he was a [Wikipedia] administrator.’

According to independent media expert Rovshan Aliyev, the posts by Pardashunas were intended to manipulate public attention away from the results of the 1 September parliamentary elections, with Aliyev adding that it was an obvious threat directed at the Wikipedia contributors.

‘This is confirmed by the fact that pro-government media outlet Yeni Musavat and other media outlets are sharing photos of specific people, as well as distributing requests to find out the addresses of these people on social networks’, he told OC Media.

Yeni Musavat later published an article on Saturday listing the people purported to be the Wikipedia contributors responsible for deleting the articles.

According to Aliyev, if those in danger wanted to seek legal recourse, they needed to first apply to the Press Council of Azerbaijan, which Pardashunas is a member of.

‘The problem is that the campaign was started by a member of the Press Council, and the chair of the Council expressed his support by re-sharing this text’, Rovshan Aliyev said. 

According to pro-government media, Pardashunas created a bot that ‘worked’ during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War to promote Azerbaijani news in Armenia and to collect Armenian data. According to Pardashunas, he believed ‘Armenians also had the right to trusted information’. 

In 2021, he received a Presidential Award for Youth from President Ilham Aliyev.