How the little town of Tīrau became ground zero in an internet fight over the spelling of te reo Māori.

This story was first published on Stuff.

One cool midwinter day, just after noon, a battle broke out in the Waikato town of Tīrau.

Actually, it’s hard to be certain about the geography of this battle, but Tīrau – 50km southeast of Hamilton, population 804 at the 2018 census, famed for corrugated iron buildings that look like a sheep and a dog – was definitely the thing being fought over.

Specifically one very small piece of Tīrau: the little line over the letter “i”.

The first shot, as detailed on Stuff’s True Story podcast this week, was at 17 minutes past noon on Saturday, July 14, 2018.

Someone, somewhere in the world, went to the free internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and, as was their right, made a few edits to the article about Tīrau.

Wherever the article said “Tirau” – T-I-R-A-U) – this person put a macron over the “i” making it Teeeerau – in Māori orthography, a macron (tohutō) over a vowel makes it sound longer.

Tweaking “Tirau” to “Tīrau” in this way wasn’t an especially weird thing to do. Around that time, all over Aotearoa, there were moves afoot to tidy up the spelling of words in te reo Māori.

People were pointing out that “keke” – K-E-K-E (no macrons) was importantly different from “kēkē” (two macrons). Because “keke” meant “cake”, and “kēkē” meant, among other things, “armpit”.

So this first edit to Tīrau wasn’t too surprising, but what happened next, was.

Eight minutes after the first edit, around 25 minutes after midday, another user called “DerbyCountyinNZ” reverted the edit: basically scrubbed the page clean of macrons. They left a note saying “Unjustified changes”. And “Common English name is ‘Tirau’ – without a macron.”

Then things escalated.

12.27pm: macrons are restored by the original editor, and some extras added to sentences about Tīrau’s dairy factory and primary school.

12.36pm: new macrons are removed, again by DerbyCountyinNZ.

At this point there was a lull.

And then …

4pm: a new player enters. Someone called “rsfinlayson”. Their edit is a sort of compromise: they add a line acknowledging there’s a Māori spelling of Tīrau – with a macron – but state “the common spelling in English remains the primary spelling on this page”.

Well, blessed are the peacemakers, but this seems to have the opposite effect – within minutes, user “johnragla” edits the page to note that, actually, the version with a macron is “also commonly used” in English.

And then, it was all on. Edits and revisions and edits and revisions all the way till dawn.

But as the day drew to a close, so did the battle of Tīrau. The warriors laid down their weapons – or, more likely, shut their laptops and thought about heading for bed.

A compromise had been reached: no macron on Tīrau in the main but a sentence near the top saying the macron version is “also widely used in New Zealand English”.

This was not, however, a time of peace. Other, similar battles were raging on Wikipedia during a period examined by Stuff’s True Story podcast, in an episode called The Great Macron War.

Axel Downard-Wilke (username “Schwede66”), a transport engineer and a Wikipedia editor and admin, knows the crowdsourced online encyclopaedia inside out.

He started editing and writing articles around 2008, his first entry about the small German village where he grew up.

He can show you how it’s possible to see every edit that’s been made to a Wikipedia page, which is why it’s possible to know the trajectory of every shot fired during The Great Macron War – though he doesn’t need to consult the logs; Downard-Wilke was there when the battles were raging.

“The question is whether a macron is part of New Zealand English,” he says. “And that’s not an easy question because Wikipedia is supposed to be based on what … secondary sources say.”

So on Wikipedia, ideally, every fact in an article will be justified by reference to another published source such as a story by reputable news media, a published book or a peer-reviewed academic paper.

Which meant Wikipedia couldn’t start using macrons if New Zealand media outlets, for example, weren’t. So, for a long time, using macrons on words of Māori origin in the English-language Wikipedia was a non-issue: they weren’t being used all that much in the real world, so they shouldn’t be on Wikipedia.

But then the real world started to change.

In 2007, New Zealand got what was reportedly its first street name with a macron: Kōkiri Place in Masterton. Around 2010, the mayor of Taupō, Rick Cooper, got sick of waiting for new road signs with macrons over the “o” so he started changing them himself, using reflective tape.

Radio NZ started using macrons in 2015, and Stuff in 2017, with other media groups not far behind.

Some people liked it, others didn’t – and those conversations filtered into discussions between Wikipedia editors. “It could get heated,” says Downard-Wilke.

Individual editors started adding macrons to place names. And other editors removed them.

And over those months of skirmishing, people like Downard-Wilke, who was pro-macron, noticed a big proportion of the anti-macron edits were being done by one particular user, rsfinlayson.

They made macron changes to dozens of articles. In comments, rsfinlayson said the people adding macrons were following “an agenda” rather than sticking to the Wikipedia rules.

During the squabbles rsfinlayson sometimes even roamed the streets – virtually, using Google street view – to prove their point that there were hardly any street signs in, say, Paekākāriki, with macrons over the two As. Thus, rsfinlayson argued, it didn’t belong on Wikipedia.

Except, pro-macroners retorted, street signs were replaced slowly, so were less important than what was happening in newspapers and Land Information NZ.

Mike Dickison, of Hokitika, (username “giantflightlessbirds”) is a digital librarian, amateur naturalist and has been a Wikipedia editor since 2009. He also spent a year as Aotearoa’s “Wikipedian at Large”, running workshops for Wikipedia editors around the country.

Dickison estimates there are just a few hundred people in New Zealand who you could call “dedicated editors”, contributing once a week or more. But despite that small pool there’s a real sense of community.

Tensions, though, emerged during The Great Macron War. The online scuffles – over place names like Tīrau, Paekākāriki and Tāmaki – rolled through 2018 and 2019.

And, in early 2020, Downard-Wilke got talking to Dickison, and they decided it was time to draw a line under all the sniping and get a clear ruling from the Wikipedia community. Downard-Wilke wrote a proposal and Dickison put together a frequently-asked-questions document.

They turned it into a formal Request for Comment (RFC) – a Wikipedia process setting out the case for a rule change, and inviting everyone to say what they think.

“People went backwards and forwards and once everyone had had a long time to talk it out, and everything had been said two or three times, at that point it was determined, OK, it’s time to close this off,” says Dickison.

In the next part of the process, a complete outsider – in this case an editor from England – took responsibility for reading all the comments, counting all the votes and boiling it down to decide where the consensus lay.

Just before the RFC was closed, though, Downard-Wilke had noticed something strange.

Remember one of the loudest voices against the macrons, the user rsfinlayson who would chime in to discussions saying macrons weren’t part of English, and who even took a virtual drive around looking for macrons?

Downard-Wilke expected them to be one of the loudest voices. Instead, they were silent.

In their place, others stepped up, including a new account called “rangatira80”. Rangatira is Māori for chief, so possibly someone qualified to discuss Māori orthography?

Anyway, rangatira80 contributed firm anti-macron arguments to the RFC conversation. Things like: “I remain concerned that this proposal will give many Kiwis a negative opinion of Wikipedia. Think about how a long-time resident of a NZ town might start thinking about Wikipedia if they wake up one morning to find that their town’s Wikipedia page now uses a spelling that almost nobody living or working there has ever used.”

Regardless, when the neutral editor from England considered the arguments, the decision was clear: bring on the macrons.

The Great Macron War was over and a team of New Zealand editors set about adding lines over certain vowels in 300-odd articles about New Zealand place names.

Still, Downard-Wilke remained curious. Where had rsfinlayson gone? And who was Rangatira80?

It turned out, Rangatira80 was actually rsfinalyson in disguise. It’s something called sock puppeting.

“Sock puppets are basically editors who use more than one account in a manner that’s not allowed,” says Downard-Wilke.

Dickison: “Sock puppets are like a capital crime in Wikipedia because all you are in Wikipedia is basically a username. And if you just start creating account after account to push your viewpoint, the whole thing falls apart.”

Like everything on Wikipedia, it’s all logged. There’s a page from mid-2020 that sets it all out: the strange absence of rsfinlayson from the RFC and how this new person, Rangatira80, popped up. And how detailed timelines of the two accounts show they have overlapping interests in specific niche subjects – not just macrons.

That was enough to warrant a closer look. “There are ways of detecting sock puppets that advanced [Wikipedia administrators] can do,” says Dickison.

A specialist in catching sock puppets investigated, and in August 2020, rsfinlayson and rangatira80 were kicked off Wikipedia.

The rsfinlayson block was only for three months, but they’ve never posted since.

We went hunting for rsfinlayson – there’s reason to believe they are a New Zealander, with a background in IT, who’s been living overseas for years.

We also looked through their Wikipedia edit history to get a sense of who they were before The Great Macron War.

It appears rsfinlayson’s second-ever edit, back in 2016, was to remove the word “Aotearoa” from an article about a TV series and replace it with “New Zealand”, leaving a comment: “This is an English-language page, so should use the English language name of the country.”

The person we believe ran the rsfinlayson account has not responded to interview requests.

So we couldn’t ask about The Great Macron War and why, when facing defeat, they appear to have put on a sock puppet disguise.

You could speculate that a New Zealander overseas who’s attached to the version of New Zealand they knew, and who sees the cultural landscape shifting in their absence, might want to fight to preserve some of the old certainties.

Dickison says you can also think about it this way: “Wikipedia is a very friendly space for people who like clear black and white rules and don’t like ambiguity because the rules are all written down. And if you like following rules, you can go ahead and apply them and fix things. And it’s a lovely retreat from the greyness and ambiguity of the real world.”

And of course, the anonymity of Wikipedia means the person behind the rsfinlayson username may have simply “created another account and is now doing something completely innocuous”, says Dickison.

“And that’s lovely if that’s the case.

“But if [they] were to ever act up again, I think the blockage would be even swifter.”