Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars: Difference between revisions

File:Head to head clowns.jpg

Bring on the clowns!

Occasionally, Wikipedians lose their minds and get into edit wars over the most petty things. This is to document that phenomenon. Please note: edit warring itself is lame. This page is dedicated to edit wars with lame or silly causes, not to exhaustively documenting all the real and contentious edit wars.

Ethnic feuds

(see also Gdanzig below)

Foustanella

Who first donned a frilly skirt and threatened to kill anyone who questioned his manhood over it? Was he Albanian or Greek? If Albanian, Gheg or Tosk? Thankfully, none of the modern day warriors on this topic have access to real weapons (we hope!) Brought to you by the Balkans -- The Balkans: Nobody does ethnic fighting like we do! (Disclaimer: The preceding was the opinion of our sponsor and in no way reflects the official attitude of Wikimedia, Inc.. Possible exceptions include Iraq and Rwanda).

Category:Hong Kong literature

Edit war over whether the category should be subcategorized under or merely linked to Category:Chinese literature. Resulted in repeated multiple reverts that led to violation of the three revert rule.

Names

Gdańzig

Edit wars have been occuring for most of a year with regards to the exact name of this Polish German Prussian Eastern Central Northern European Baltic Baltijas city.

Richard Neustadt

Two months of edit war on whether the page should say "[[Harry S Truman|President Truman]]" or "President [[Harry S Truman]]" (plus the same with several other presidents).

Fossil fuel for reciprocating piston engines equipped with spark plugs

Should this substance be called gasoline or petrol? See the talk page for a debate about the total number of English speakers in the world, the relative utility of search engines and claims that UK-wikipedians are set to re-establish the British empire by moving pages to British spellings and that Americans who want "gasoline" are being their usual nationalistic/culturally imperialistic selves. Gasoline has been settled on for now, only because it was the original title, but the fallout has yet to settle.

Land making up Tsushima subprefecture

Is it an island or a group of islands? Does it matter if there are islets surrounding what people call an island? Can we still consider it an island if the navy blasted a shipping channel in the middle of it? Maybe the Japanese name should be used to decide. Or possibly the English term used to refer to it by the government of Japan. Or is it just a case of one side thinking about the landmass in the sea (e.g. Great Britain) while the other the island as a political entity (e.g. United Kingdom) and couldn't actually agree on what the article is actually about??

Missing sun motif

Is it a collection of myths or a motif? Should "sun" be capitalized or not? What about "underworld"? Edit warring over these and other weighty issues have involved four editors and most of the article's history.

Devil's Lake (North Dakota)

Shockingly, there are multiple locations in the United States with the name "Devil's Lake." A very heated war broke out here regarding which one should be featured, whether a disambig page was needed, even over the usage of the apostrophe- eventually literally devolving into "my lake is better than yours!"

File:QueenSabrina.jpg

We are not easily amused, but...

Her Late Majesty

Must a queen deceased for over a century still be styled here “Her Majesty”, an epithet conventionally reserved for the current monarch? This weighty dispute, filling talk pages and edit histories, obviously resurrecting eager expressions of participants' pet views of royalty and monarchy, has spilled over into other British monarchs, other royals and titleholders, several countries having or having had a monarchy, claimants and other royal pretensions, and even hundreds of holders of the papacy, where popes centuries dead are endorsed as “His Holiness” here for short periods, losing and regaining the endorsement with blinks of eyes. Ongoing debates deal with the format of dates, and the used or unused, existing or non-existent surnames family names house names former fiefs (some inherited names very few are sure what they precisely are) of monarchs and relatively unfamiliar variants of those (as well as the putative name of the horse of her late majesty's husband's family), with most edits being extremely trivial. Involved parties vouch for only aiming at accuracy, and certainly some argumentation goes deeper than believed humanly possible. This even created an edit war over whether it could be mentioned here.

"local girl makes good"

Pet views on royalty again, mostly same parties warring - but aligned contrariwise. Could an American woman who made an ex-king her catch, keep here the title she was bestowed by the marriage, or is the begrudging native "she stole our king" attitude a reason sufficient to revert her posthumously back to her first husband's surname, i.e Wallis Simpson. See how contrary POVs enter the debate, persons who had wanted "majesties" and "highnesses" used in each minor royal's articles going to strip an American girl of her only nobility title, and see chivalrous Americans fighting to metaphorical death in defense of a countrywoman's entitlement. An interesting point has been whether it is fatal or not that she married her Duke after his abdication, and how all that relates to various Austrian, Russian, Romanian etc losses of monarchies, as well as to her sisters-in-law and also to Fergie.

Victoria, the flatulent auld bitch

The battle royal continues, with a question as to whether the statue of Queen Victoria outside Leinster House in Dublin was called "The Auld Bitch", as James Joyce famously called her in Dubliners. The cream of the joke is that the statue hasn't been in Dublin for years - she was moved to Sydney.

Dates

Death By Stereo

Was this band officially formed in 1996 or 1998?

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Was it released in 1988, or '89? Was it released straight to video before hitting the theaters? If so, does that count?

Ned's Atomic Dustbin

Was their independent EP The Ingredients released in 1989 or 1990?

Nancy Reagan

Was she born in 1921? Or 1923? After days of editing, does anyone really care THAT much? The woman is old. (She was born in 1921.)

Punctuation

FOX News

VeryVerily rewrites part of a paragraph; 172 reverts because of three commas placed outside quotation marks; revert war between VeryVerily and 172 ensues.

Template:Wikipedialang

Edit war involving three sysops over whether there should be commas in "10000" and "1000." Leads to a blocking and liberal use of the rollback button.

Spelling

Aluminium

The non-North-American English-speaking world spells it aluminium with two letter "i"'s, the official IUPAC spelling is aluminium also with two letter "i"'s, and that's where the article is - with two letter "i"'s. There are occasional futile attempts to put the word back to aluminum, which only has one letter "i" in it.

Potato chips

Should potato chips be flavored or flavoured? What is the provenance of the potato chip, America or UK? Four-user revert war on these important issues results in the page getting protected and listed on RfC. And the chips become seasoned.

Sysop Wars

User:The Trolls of Navarone

Two sysops in a revert war over the user page of a banned sockpuppet of hard-banned user:142. Then, a month later, a user takes one of them to Quickpolls over the revert war.

Main Page

What April Fool's jokes should be mentioned on the Main Page, if any? This protected page, editable only by admins, normally goes unedited for days—all content is included from templates, so there is no need to edit the Main Page directly. On April 1, 2005, it racks up more than 60 revisions of varying seriousness before finally being reverted to a days-old version. This does not even include all revisions of the templates the Main Page includes.

Templates

Cookbook, Cookbookpar, Wikibookspar, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikiquotepar, Wiktionary, Wiktionarypar, Wikisource, Wikisourcepar, Wikisource author, Wikispecies, Wikinews

Should a meta-template be used to standardize the format of all of these? Do the advantages of the meta-template outweigh the potential cost in server resources? Lack of agreement on these issues leads to constant reverts between Itai and Netoholic

Photographs

Feces

Revert wars, alleged sock-puppetry, and page protection: should the article on feces include this picture of a large human turd? As of early July 2005, the discussion on this issue alone had reached 12,900 words.

Invisible Pink Unicorn

Edit war over what pictures (if any) to include of a parody deity, and how to capture them.

Cat

34 reverts in just over an hour. The pressing issues: Should one unremarkable photo be included? Is the cat depicted really smiling? Both users were blocked for 30 seconds—"a suitably lame block for a remarkably lame edit war"—after protection of the page had halted the reverts. One user resumed after protection was lifted the next day, leading to further 12 reverts over the same photograph. Another page protection put a stop to the lameness.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Which picture should top the article: "Old style" Sonic or 3D Sonic? After a some discussion, including an image-by-image vote on every image on the page, consensus settled on both.

Miscellaneous lameness

Weblog

Is a blog an application or is it the product of an application? See The discussion on the Talk: page for Weblog

Europe

Revert war over whether Europe is commonly considered a continent or not.

Cauliflower

Is cauliflower nutritious? Is specifying what parts are usable POV?

List of numbers that are always odd

The number 3 was being considered as possibly being not odd. Page protection was needed to halt the heated debate. User:Wik's correction of a misspelling of hypochondriacs was re-reverted no less than 3 times. Supposedly as a means to illustrate the ludicrousness of the subject, various examples such as "the atomic numbers of gold and silver, but not their sum" and "the number of days in a year (except leap years)" were added to the list. Later in the edit war, no less than two thousand five hundred numbers of debated oddness (every second integer from 1 to 4999) were added and removed, four hundred ninety eight of them repeatedly before the edit war was solved by the article's deletion after a VfD vote.

Wikipedia:Yet more bad jokes and other deleted nonsense#Edit conflicts

The edit war on the Wikipedia:Edit conflicts page, preserved in Yet More Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense.

Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship

Wik's nominations of 9 Wikipedia:Wikicops were moved; the wikicops page itself got in a move war about a week later and ended back at Wikipedia:Administrators.

Sarah Edmonds

Wik makes a correction, giving her middle name and month of birth. This gets lost through an edit conflict, and Danny and Alexandros add a paragraph worth of content. Wik reverts. Danny reverts. Etcetera. The only objection either had with the other's edits was that it reverted their own.

Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars ever

Edit war over what edit wars should be on this page. - see Recursion; see also tail recursion. Most recent warring: Her Late Majesty (see below).

Suncrest, Washington

Constant reversion of Mark Richards's "vandalism" by original creator who seemed to think it was his page. See page history and VfD discussion.

Grace Kelly

Edit war over whether she is a gay icon.

Miss Kitty Fantastico

Edit war over whether it is appropriate for the text some demons to link to the article Evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet.

Micronations

Two self-proclaimed leaders of micronations in a lengthy revert war in this and other articles about the comparative value and notability of their made-up countries.

User talk:66.167.235.16

User:Arminius left the Template:test message on the anonymous user's talk page. The anonymous user removed the test message. A three hour, 25-edit war followed over whether or not the talk page should include such inflammatory messages as {{test}} and welcome notices. Other admins were called in to look at the situation, and, after careful analysis and fact-checking, it was determined to be a very lame edit war indeed.

Susan Hawk

Was she in Survivor: Pulau Tiga or Survivor: Borneo? Considering both were in heavy use, one really shouldn't have precedence over the other (although Pulau Tiga was the term used for years before Jeff Probst introduced the term Borneo for the first season); in any case, the edit war between the older term and the newer term has gone on for months.

SkyOS

Fast & furious kindergarten catfight with accusations of GPL violations, advertising, lying and fanboyism.

Apple pie

Is apple pie really "all American"? This weighty issue causes a revert war, ending in a 24-hour block, two ArbCom cases, and the temporary departure of one Wikipedian.

What would Jesus do?

Should the article link to Brian Boitano or What Would Brian Boitano Do?. Should a movie title be italicized? Did something happen in the middle of the 1990's or the mid- to late-1990's? These and other probing questions were at the heart of five-day long edit war between Anthony and Wik, during which the page had to be protected twice. The campaign spread to other pages, with What Would Brian Boitano Do? surviving a VfD listing by Wik.

Exploding whale

Is the phrase "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds" worthy of inclusion? Was placed on WP:RFC at one point.

Charles Darwin

Is sharing a birthday with Abraham Lincoln important enough to include in the Charles Darwin article, or is it a bit of trivia that has no place in an encyclopedia? As of 4 February 2005, there has been an eight week-long revert war over a single sentence. There have been two polls on the Darwin Talk pages, one request for a debate, one WP:RFC, one WP:RFM, one WP:RFAr denied, and one recently closed RFAr. The discussions at Talk:Charles Darwin/Lincoln and LincolnArchive01, plus the arbitration pages amount to some 30,000 words, which is about the length of a short Agatha Christie novel.

Irish breakfast

What goes into an Irish breakfast; black pudding, white pudding or neither? Is the bacon boiled or fried? See the talk page for an in-depth of the various issues.

Katie Couric

Is she an "entertainer" or a "journalist?" Is it necessary to mention that she "annoyingly" drops the "g" at the end of words (e.g. "morneen")?

Furry

Huge edit war over whether or not the article should be re-directed to furry fandom with multiple reverts and multiple-paragraph arguments on the talk page.

Mezmerize

Recurring edit wars over such trivialities as the release date of the album and the chart positions of songs.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Are Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader considered one character or two separate ones? Do they deserve separate listings in the "credits" section? This seemingly trivial disagreement degenerates into a full-fledged revert war, complete with allegations of vandalism, 3RR violations, aggressive edit summaries and a week long page-protection.

As a side note: Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back has also been the site of an edit war over whether Ian McDiarmid should be included in the credits or not for his role in the Special Edition version.

Urban75

Is Urban75 a "left leaning" or "liberal leaning" site? A two-month argument on this results in hundreds of reverts, userpage vandalism, sockpuppetry & two separate VfDs

Football World Cup

Who finished third in the 1930 World Cup? United States? Yugoslavia? With still one year to go before the next World Cup, this subject gives involved users something to pass the time.