The Russian blogosphere is buzzing with talk about yesterday’s vicious assault on human rights activist Lev Ponomarev in Moscow. One particularly hot topic right now is the sensational discovery that a premature report of Ponomarev’s death appeared, of all places, in his Wikipedia entry before the news of the assault even hit the airwaves and became public knowledge. Here’s what the «Novaya gazeta» website reported at 14:32 Moscow time on 01 April:

… 10 minutes before the appearance in the information agencies of a report on the assault on Ponomarev, a certain anonymous author got onto his page in Wikipedia (the free Internet-encyclopedia) and added there the date of death: 2 April of the year 2009. A ЖЖ [the Russian LiveJournal] user with the nickname terco.livejournal.com removed this inscription. However, the information remained in screen shots. Later, the location of this anonymous author was clarified:

city of Ryazan, precise data:
95.83.158.173.spark-ryazan.ru (95.83.158.173)
95.83.128.0 – 95.83.159.255
CJSC “Electro-com Ryazan”
Electro-com Ryazan IT
Gorkogo st, 102b, Ryazan, Russia

The LiveJournal page in question, which has skyrocketed into the top 30 most popular ЖЖ pages in Russia right now, contains the following additional information (beginning with terco’s initial statement):