Articles of War

By Mother Jones

January/February 2007 Issue

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Wikipedia’s open-editing policy occasionally spawns all-out showdowns in which users try to “revert” one another’s disagreeable entries into oblivion. A few examples, as collected on the online encyclopedia’s “Lamest Edit Wars” page (itself the subject of not a little nitpicking):

• Cat: "34 reverts in just over an hour. The pressing issues: Should one unremarkable photo be included? Is the cat depicted really smiling?... As it turned out, the photo was deleted for not having any copyright status."
• Mama’s Family: "Was Mama (Vicki Lawrence) ‘pro-active,’ ‘foxy,’ ‘clever,’ ‘cunning,’ or none of the above? Apparently this question is important enough to occupy over 30 edits in one day."
• List of virgins: "Dispute about whether or not Britney Spears belonged on the list, eventually resolved in a definitive manner: maintenance of the list proved impossible and it was later deleted."
• Wii: "Does it rhyme with ‘We’ or ‘Wee’? Should ‘Wee’ link to urine?... Should urine be mentioned in the article at all? Just some of the hard hitting issues that provoked in excess of 1,500 edits in the space of two weeks... All this for a videogame console that hasn’t even been released yet."
• Feces: "Should the article on feces include [a] picture of a large human turd? As of early July 2005, the discussion on this issue alone had reached 12,900 words."
• Nancy Reagan: "Was she born in 1921? Or 1923? After days of editing, does anyone really care THAT much? Woman is old."

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