Wiki Mess Ups or Funny Changes

Twenty years ago this Friday, January 15, the internet changed forever. Wikipedia went live, gifting the world with a cavern of endless information, both helpful and potentially questionable. Happy birthday, Wikipedia .

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In 2013 and 2015, director J.J. Abrams made back-to-back blockbusters in famous sci-fi series that were largely well received by critics and audiences alike. Both Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Wars: The Force Awakens became the highest-grossing entries in their respective franchises, but each borrowed heavily from a previous, foundational film, namely Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and the original Star Wars. Despite the movies' box office success, not everyone appreciated the director's decisions to go back to beloved wells. Star Wars director George Lucas lamented that there was "nothing new" in The Force Awakens, Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer dismissed Into Darkness as a "gimmicky" homage, and fan debates about Abrams's recycling continue to rage.

The entries for the films on Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia that turned 20 on Friday, note the objections of Lucas, Meyer, and other figures who found the films derivative. But contributors to both pages were also consumed by intense and enduring debates about the movies that had nothing to do with their artistic merits: how to format their titles. Should the page for The Force Awakens list Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens as an official alternate title or not? And should the "I" in "Into" be capitalized or lowercase? Thousands of words were devoted to articulating and defending each position.

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Those are just two of the hundreds of disputes memorialized on Wikipedia's "Lamest Edit Wars" page, a humorous monument to Wikipedia editors' tendency to take their volunteer roles extremely seriously. Jens Kruse Andersen, a.k.a. "PrimeHunter," added the Force Awakens dispute to the compendium on December 24, 2015, less than a week after the movie made it to theaters. Andersen, a Danish administrator of English Wikipedia, is listed as one of the most active editors of "Lamest Edit Wars," though his small tweaks to the page from 2007 to 2019 constitute only a tiny percentage of the almost 61,000 Wikipedia edits he's made in total. In addition to the Force Awakens kerfuffle, Andersen has added an argument about which order the tied top scorers from the 2010 FIFA World Cup should be listed in and an even more esoteric disagreement about where a misspelled search term should be set to redirect. "I don't have favorites," he says. "There are so many good ones."

The "Lamest Edit Wars" page—in retrospect, unfortunately named, considering the discourse surrounding the ableist connotations of "lame"—was created on February 24, 2004, by Andrew Lih, who went on to author the 2009 book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. Lih didn't respond to a question about what prompted him to start the page, but he began the ongoing undertaking by describing the whimsical purpose of the page and including two example edit wars, one over whether cauliflower is nutritious and another over whether the number 3 is ever not odd.

Lih's user page includes a quote from writer Robert Niles, who once advised his readers, "Forget 'balance.' Go find the truth." For Wikipedia editors, finding the truth—or at least linking to it—sometimes entails participating in improbably in-depth and drawn-out debates about minutiae, accompanied by copious edits and counter-edits. "Truth is ultimately unknowable, and Wikipedia is just one way of trying to make sense of the world," says William Beutler, the founder and president of digital marketing agency Beutler Ink, and a veteran Wikipedia editor who blogs about the encyclopedia at The Wikipedian. "And when they can't agree to make sense, they have lame edit wars instead."

Wikipedia surpassed 6 million articles last January, which means there are thousands of theaters in which to wage the most mundane campaigns of Wikipedia war. In countless corners of Wikipedia, there are "one or two people who cared deeply about a page and they are doing battle, and no one else cares enough to come get involved," Beutler says. "People's interests are far flung, and they're not all going to be focused on U.S. politics or Ireland and Northern Ireland or Israel and Palestine. They might just be arguing about which toothpaste brand first announced the whitening formula."

It's natural to laugh at some of the sillier squabbles, which the page's architects encourage. The guide to egregiously trivial edit wars, which achieved virality via a (somewhat misleading) 2010 infographic, is clearly labeled as a humor page and included in Wikipedia's so-called "Department of Fun," a collection of lighthearted diversions intended to boost the morale of editors engaged in the laborious and often thankless collective effort of democratizing knowledge.

But there's still something admirable about the impulses that animate even the most ridiculous controversies. The resolutions of many individual edit wars may not matter, and some disputes descend into belligerence. But without the underlying urge to discover, document, and categorize information that often drives the risible debates, Wikipedia probably wouldn't exist or be as useful as it is. In that sense, the "Lamest Edit Wars," in all their time-wasting, face-palming majesty, embody both the best and worst qualities of the encyclopedia itself. It would be hard to have a handy, free storehouse of human knowledge that puts us all one web search away from sounding semi-informed about almost any subject without occasional crowdsourcing that runs off the rails.

"It is a double-edged sword," says Wikipedia admin Barkeep49, who admits to dabbling in a still-extant edit war over the caption on a photo of British economist Guy Standing, who caused consternation by appearing on his page as a guy sitting until his photo was mercifully cropped. (Barkeep created the corresponding page for Guy Standing on sister site Simple Wikipedia, where the debate has begun again.) "Wikipedia takes itself very seriously, which has helped increase our value to readers," Barkeep continues. "But it also can cause thousands and thousands of words being spilled over inane topics."

The entries on the "Lamest Edit Wars" page are sorted into about two dozen categories, encompassing disputes centered on names, dates, numbers and statistics, and so on. "A lot of them are motivated by regional or ethnic pride," Beutler says, noting that the spark is almost "always just one fact, because you can focus on one fact." Editors have battled over the nationalities or ancestries of notable figures ranging from artists such as Frédéric Chopin, Freddie Mercury, and Werner Herzog to scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Nikola Tesla—and, for that matter, fictional characters including Niko Bellic from Grand Theft Auto IV. They've clashed over whether U2—half of whose members were born in England—should be classified as an "Irish band" or a band from Ireland. They've been deadlocked over whether to call the city that's been part of Poland and Germany (depending on the period) Gdańsk or Danzig.

Low-stakes, high-intensity edit wars are fought on all fronts, with ground gained or ceded as slowly as it was in the World War I trenches. What's the diameter of the Death Star? How tall were/are André the Giant and Rey Mysterio? How old is a "preteen"? Are potato chips "flavored" or "flavoured," and can we compromise on "seasoned"? Is it yogurt or yoghurt? Gasoline or petrol? Are they the Beatles or The Beatles? Eagles or the Eagles? Did the creature from Cloverfield have a name? What's the time signature of Pink Floyd's "Money"? How is Cranky Kong related to Donkey Kong? Should the article for "anus" include an image of an anus, and if so, whose anus should it be? And should the page for "the gender of God" say god, gods, or Gods instead? Or possibly supreme being or divine entity? And would "sex" would be more apropos than "gender"?

Wikipedia's mission isn't to establish the truth; it's to relate what reliable sources have verified. Some of the questions above have ascertainable answers with trusted sources to cite. Others stem from almost unresolvable epistemological quandaries. No wonder clicking the first link in the main text of a string of Wikipedia pages almost inevitably leads to the page for Philosophy. "All of this is about the messy business of trying to impose a rigorous order upon the very messy reality of the world that does not always conform to specific categories," Beutler says. "And that is compounded by Wikipedia's reliance upon existing sources to verify that information. When those sources conflict, and when those sources appear to be of uneven reputability, it can lead to these conundrums that in some sense can never really, truly be answered."

The persistence of certain debates may be partly attributable to trolling, but Beutler says, "Most of these edit wars are based on genuine disagreements. … I don't think most people set out trying to get in an edit war. They just happen to find themselves in one. And they're ready to stand their ground." In accordance with Sayre's law, the least consequential topics sometimes spur the most heated debates, a product of internet tunnel vision and the sense of injustice spurred by someone being wrong on the internet. "When you are sitting alone in front of your computer at 2 in the morning and somewhere out there in the world is some unknown person who you only know by their on-screen handle, and they are challenging something that you know to be true and correct, the whole world can recede and this one thing can become the most important battle that you've ever fought," Beutler says.

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Every editor has hobbies and bugaboos; Beutler used to scour the page for The Sopranos and change usages of British English to American English, as dictated by Wikipedia's policy that articles about American subjects be written in American vernacular. Some would-be wars can be averted if the editors involved practice diplomacy instead of escalating the conflict. For instance, in 2016 Beutler created an article about "the jumbo slice," an oversized piece of pizza sold in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Another editor amended the page to point out that Koronet Pizza in New York City had begun selling oversized slices first. Beutler considered fighting the change on the grounds that the New York pizzeria wasn't part of the same scene, but the other editor provided a citation that backed up their claim about giant-pizza provenance, and Beutler consented to the change. "That could have been a lamest edit war, but I'm a little bit more levelheaded," he says.

The longer the debates stretch on, the more they tend to get bogged down in details. But minutiae matter to the small subset of Wikipedia users who actually create and curate its content. Carl Sagan said in Cosmos that humans are made of star stuff. Wikipedia is made of details. "Wikipedia is nothing but details," Beutler says. "It's millions and millions and millions of details all collated together."

As amusing as protracted, petty edit wars are, there's a drawback to the drama: It may drive editors away. Wikipedia's number of edits and number of editors (active and otherwise) peaked in 2007 and then steadily declined for several years before plateauing around 2014. The editorial ranks have rebounded a bit lately, thanks in part to a pandemic-prompted surge, but only about 40,000 editors are active on English Wikipedia in any given month, a pittance compared to the nearly 900 million devices that visit the site over the same span of time, generating close to 10 billion page views.

Wikimedia Statistics

Not everyone wants to tangle with territorial lifers or keyboard warriors who are spoiling for a fight about facts. "There are some people who really enjoy the conflict aspects of it," Beutler says. "But then most people don't. And so that can scare off a lot of other people who just wanted to … pull up some knowledge and organize it for the world to read." Editors of English Wikipedia are also disproportionately American, male, and white, and cliquish contentiousness and harassment in edit wars and on discussion pages may discourage the participation of women and people of color, exacerbating the gender and racial biases that already exist.

But as Evan Rachel Wood once said, there is an upside to anger—or, at least, moderate discord. Taha Yasseri, an associate sociology professor at University College Dublin who has extensively studied conflict and collaboration on Wikipedia, says he's conducted unpublished research in which readers rated the quality of articles associated with different levels of editor conflict. The articles with a moderate amount of conflict among their editors were assessed to have the highest quality. "Sometimes Wikipedia wars are lame (or on topics that should not be controversial), but often they lead to a well-polished and comprehensive article," Yasseri says. An edit war can be the crucible in which a superior page is forged.

Yasseri's findings jibe with published research that found that politically polarized groups of editors produced higher-quality articles than politically homogenous groups, even when the articles aren't political in nature. But on Wikipedia, where edit wars can repel new blood, tie up admins and moderators, and divert attention from underserved sections, "the line between productive conflict and destructive edit wars is oftentimes quite thin," says Thorsten Ruprechter, who coauthored a paper on Wikipedia editing behavior and article quality with his colleagues at Austria's Graz University of Technology last year. "Productive controversies and conflict can quickly change into personal feuds or unproductive quarreling." Blocks, bans, measures such as the "three-revert rule" (which limits the number of times an editor can undo another user's changes), or stricter controls imposed by the community, admins, or Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee can help foster consensus and bring about edit-war détente.

The pace of edits to the "Lamest Edit Wars" overview has followed roughly the same trajectory as the rest of Wikipedia. The page is packed with more content than ever, but its under-the-hood activity has tailed off.

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It's probably for the best if editors are occupied elsewhere. There's plenty of important work to do, like banding together to document breaking news—how does one describe a developing incursion at the Capitol while maintaining a neutral tone?—covering the coronavirus or the protests precipitated by the killing of George Floyd, or building a disambiguation page to distinguish multiple presidential impeachments. Or, for that matter, rescuing articles from undeserved deletion, fending off vandals and hoaxers, and combating misinformation, which Beutler calls "asymmetric warfare" between editors who do and don't adhere to Wikipedia's principles.

There's an altruistic element to all of this, coupled with pride. "Some editors really enjoy the power that comes with determining what the world will read about the topic that matters to them most," Beutler says. And although the world may not know their names, he adds, "there's a very real sense among editors that the work that they're doing is important," especially if they're contributing to heavily edited, well-trafficked pages about sensitive topics and current events.

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Wikipedia wouldn't work without users like Jeff G., a Grandmaster Editor with more than 14 years of service and a six-figure edit count who commits much of his spare time to reverting vandalism that eludes Wikipedia's anti-vandalism measures. Vandals may mess with Wikipedia for any number of reasons: whitewashing a certain subject, promoting themselves, or just watching Wikipedia's world burn. Jeff became a watcher on Wikipedia's walls and learned to weather the onslaughts of its hostile attackers because he wanted to help the planet.

"I grew up with parents and grandparents that believed in the people, and education," he says. "And working with an online encyclopedia helps both. So I try to help Wikipedia, as an online encyclopedia, to educate people to better themselves, to give them more knowledge, because knowledge is power. And to speak truth to power, which has only become more important this past year and these past four years."

At least lame edit wars can be won, even if the victories are Pyrrhic. The work of Wikipedia editors like Jeff G. is unceasing. "It's not like a conventional war," he says. "You can't beat down the enemy to the point where they surrender." The vital editorial tasks that protect and improve Wikipedia 20 years after its birth are in some respects far removed from fights over the formatting of The Force Awakens. But they're both part of the same modern marvel. "It takes a village, or a global village, to run a project like this," says Jeff. "Some people said that it would never last, because it's all user-driven. But obviously they were wrong." No citation needed.

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Source: https://www.theringer.com/2021/1/15/22232667/wikipedia-lamest-edit-wars

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