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.”
The description of Brown as “Black” was added and then removed in multiple rounds of edit volleying. So was the term career criminal.
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.
On Sunday at 11:54 p.m., an editor called Scoaldr, who had just 41 edits on Wikipedia, proposed that the article be deleted. Scoaldr pinned a note to the article that stated, “The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia’s general notability guideline.”
The notability guideline is core to Wikipedia and is intended to draw a line between an encyclopedia and a newspaper, magazine, blog, or any other more ephemeral publication. In Wikipedia’s case, to meet the threshold, an event, idea, or individual must be covered by multiple reliable sources in a substantive manner. The idea here is more along the lines of lasting relevance befitting of an encyclopedia.
Like almost every other aspect of Wikipedia, the notability standard is highly malleable in practice. There is little about British frozen food producers, New Jersey waste recycling companies, a Denmark roller coaster themed around dog flatulence, or a list of people who have died on the toilet that is notable. Nevertheless, Wikipedia keeps these articles—and tens of thousands more like them—on the site. (Most lack any kind of box notifying readers of their potential non-notability.)
In another edit of “Killing of Iryna Zarutska,” Scoaldr removed the deletion proposal because “I clearly have no idea how to do templates correctly. Will a more senior editor please give it a try?”
Hours later, another editor joined in, this time removing Brown’s name from the Wikipedia article, citing “serious WP:BLPCRIME violations.” The editor referred to a Wikipedia policy that says: “For individuals who are not public figures—that is, individuals not covered by § Public figures—editors must seriously consider not including material—in any article—that suggests the person has committed or is accused of having committed a crime, unless a conviction has been secured for that crime.”
Other editors attempted to restore mentions of Brown’s name, but each attempt was reversed by the editor who had originally removed it, FDW777. Another editor, WikiCleanerMan, added another banner to the article: “The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia’s general notability guideline.” And while murder was still stricken from the title, the article still contained a section that was headed by the term.
If you look at “Killing of Iryna Zarutska,” Brown’s name doesn’t appear at all in the latest version of the article—and only four times in a list of references at the bottom.
On the article’s Talk page, where editors can discuss improvements to articles, Scoaldr agitated for the deletion of the article, arguing that this was just another crime. Other editors pushed back, drawing the inevitable comparison to George Floyd. “If Iryna Zarutska’s killing is not noteworthy or remarkable, then neither is George Floyd’s,” one editor wrote. “The [sic] apply the same standard to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, or hosts of other killings Wikipedia editors decided were ‘important,’ ‘noteworthy,’ or ‘remarkable.’ ”
This is a key point—just not in the way the editor intended. In comparison, it wasn’t the killing of Floyd, Martin, or Brown that provided the counterpoint. Instead, it was a shooting that took place in the aftermath to another Black Lives Matter–related bout of unrest.
This weekend’s Zarutska controversy touched a bundle of political and cultural nerves, including race, gender, Black Lives Matter, the Ukraine war, urban crime, mental illness, and the left-wing push to end the “carceral state.”
In August 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during riots that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. In October 2020, an article titled “Kenosha unrest shooting” was created on Wikipedia. It extensively mentioned Rittenhouse, then a minor, as the shooter. One representative version of the article included his name 50 times.
In the first 500 edits to the Kenosha article that I was able to review, not a single editor referred to WP:BLPCRIME as a reason to keep Rittenhouse’s name out of the article. He had not been convicted of any crime—and would, in fact, be acquitted. Editors changed rioters to protesters, among other updates, but there was no mention of the appropriateness of using his name. One of the few edits on this point moved Rittenhouse’s name up in the article’s lead to ensure it would be mentioned in the first sentence, where it remains today.
The same editor who fought to remove any mention of Decarlos Brown Jr.’s name from the Wikipedia article about Iryna Zarutska’s killing, FDW777, made a number of edits to the Kenosha article. For example, FDW777 altered the field for “motive” in the article’s info box from “Stated as self-defense” to “Alleged by defense attorney as self-defense.”
At one point, an editor added an unsubstantiated reference from The Guardian, which falsely reported that Rittenhouse was “among white armed extremists.” Another editor changed the sentence to read, “The Guardian libeled the shooter with the false accusation of ‘white armed extremists,’ ” but FDW777 stepped in to restore the statement. At no point did FDW777 make any attempt to remove Rittenhouse’s name on the basis of the WP:BLPCRIME policy.
This weekend’s Zarutska controversy touched a bundle of political and cultural nerves, including race, gender, Black Lives Matter, the Ukraine war, urban crime, mental illness, and the left-wing push to end the “carceral state.” And there were other hot-button questions: Who gets the news coverage? Whose killing is brushed off as another tragic statistic? And whose becomes part of a narrative about a national reckoning?
To date, Wikipedia’s treatment of Zarutska’s killing lays bare the double standard, which is neither indirect nor abstract. That double standard is very real and very deliberate. While the editorial debates in newsrooms almost always remain opaque to the public, Wikipedia archives its deliberative process.
The power wielded by a small group of volunteer encyclopedia editors and administrators rarely makes headlines. Yet their decisions ripple outward, informing what journalists report, what search engines surface, and how the public understands reality and recent history. In the case of Iryna Zarutska, the fight over whether her killing merits a Wikipedia page is more than an editorial squabble. It’s a real-time demonstration of how information is filtered—and how easily a victim can disappear, even when her killing is caught on tape.
https://www.thefp.com/p/woman-stabbed-to-death-on-train-by-serial-criminal