Wiki edit wars

Welcome to the study of the wiki phenomenon known as the edit war. The fundamental technological innovation of wiki is that it provides a convenient way for multiple contributors to edit webpages. But what happens when the edits of one contributor are simply removed or "reverted" by another editor? Then the fun begins. What can we learn about how wiki communities deal with this fundamental problem?

Definitions and scope

A narrow definition of "edit war" can be stated: "An edit war occurs when contributors, or groups of contributors, repeatedly revert each other's contributions."

This learning project has a wider scope than this definition might imply. The above definition is like saying: "a war is when combatants from two armies repeatedly attack and kill each other". This learning project attempts to take the widest possible view of "edit war" and identify all methods used during editing conflicts, not just reverting.

Edit wars have been fought over trivial matters where just two editors do not agree on a trivial issue such as how to format the names of articles (should it be "Evolutionary Biology" or "Evolutionary biology"?). Other edit wars involve large numbers of editors on two sides of a real world conflict. It might be possible to divide edit wars into those that arise due to differences in opinion about how to use wiki technology and those that reflect pre-existing conflicts in the real world that are imported to a wiki and fought by two teams of wiki editors who have difficulty agreeing on what to say about the real world conflict.

The goal of the learning project is to understand the phenomenon of edit waring and learn how wiki communities can limit the damage done by edit wars and prevent edit wars from being fought.

Research projects

In order to understand the nature of edit wars, it is useful to study some examples.

• Homeopathy edit war - at Wikipedia. Time frame: 2001 - on going