Article: Word War III; As soon as he became president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touched off a boisterous debate on Wikipedia--a conflict as unruly and entertaining as the online encyclopedia itself

HE LIT THE FUSE BY ACCIDENT, with good intentions serving as his matchstick. On June 8, 2005, at 10:50 a.m., a 26-year-old computer software engineer in Tehran created a seemingly innocuous entry on Wikipedia about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then a fringe candidate running for president of Iran. The minibiography was just 73 words long. Its author, Roozbeh Pournader, had no clue he was touching off an explosive war of words that would rage online for more than two years.

"At that time," says Pournader, who now lives in California, "Ahmadinejad's running was considered a joke."

Pournader is part of an army of several hundred thousand volunteers who collectively produce Wikipedia, the enormously ...

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