Lamest Edit Wars | Hacker News Reader

Lamest Edit Wars

en.wikipedia.org

129 pointsjustin6688 comments

Wikipedia is massively raging in edit wars.

Before 2014's Russian aggression towards Ukraine, several Crimea-related pages pointed out (with citations) that Crimea tried to split from Ukraine twice already during soviet times, but this whole narrative was steadily rewritten after 2014.

Considering how many people rely on Wikipedia to get "facts", this has always struck me at how much history rewriting can happen and how much can it influence the world we live in.

Now, I'm no historian, and I didn't live in Crimea in the 70s, I have no clue what happened there but the whole edit war about Crimea-related pages made me really think about how little and how potentially distorted (in multiple ways) information can be even for recent events.

I think The Office put that beautifully when Michael Scott says:

“Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.”

The best place to find alternate views is on the Talk page of any controversial article. You can usually judge the bias of an article by reading the discussion on its Talk page (and making sure to view the archives).

This is actually a great suggestion I never thought about, but most users will never read it and assume the michael scott way.

My thumb rule is to ignore wikipedia for any article with a hint of politics. Unfortunately over time nothing is being spared from politics

It's surprising how far politics reaches tho

Armenian history related articles are always a great time in the talk pages. Lots of Turkish ultranationalists diving in, occasionally the Kurdish irredentists get in the mix.

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. " ― Pericles

I don't know what the second one is supposed to be, but at least one instance is featured on the History of Crimea page,[0] which leads to a fairly detailed page about the related referendum.[1] Seems pretty factual to me.

> With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence the majority ethnic Russian Crimean peninsula was reorganized as the Republic of Crimea,[54][55] after a 1991 referendum with the Crimean authorities pushing for more independence from Ukraine and closer links with Russia. In 1995, the Republic was forcibly abolished by Ukraine with the Autonomous Republic of Crimea established firmly under Ukrainian authority.[56]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea#Post-Soviet_...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_sovereignty_refer...

> Seems pretty factual to me.

But the instances where this happened during the 80s, Crimean leadership working to split from Ukraine are nowhere to be found.

Now, did they happen? How? That's my point, it's not easy to find anymore, unless one at least remembers the exact page and can scroll the history to the point this information was still present.

I remember reading them about those in February 2014 when I wanted to understand what was happening better, and I remember myself forming the opinion that maybe Crimeans didn't really want to be part of Ukraine from already quite some time.

But if a user reads it now, the overall narrative is much milder. Another person may form a different opinion.

Thus my point that edit wars can influence lots of people thinking.

Not sure if this 80s secession attempt is true, but just to add some dimension of complexity, if such things mentioned without a vast context it's guaranteed to be misunderstood. In 80s it was still USSR, and what was "X leadeship" then? Communist party territorial organization, indeed. CPSU had a strict vertically imposed subordination. If it's true X oblast leadership tried to switch from one Soviet territory to another, we're probably talking level of apparatchik's intrigues, at times fueled by personal animosity, or corrupted interests conflict. But wait, there's more. In 80s central Soviet leadership decided to positivily re-brand itself from failed imperial center to a neutral stability sponsor, and started to clandestinely (not so much) encourage irredentism, and separatism in constituent republics to then weigh in as an arbiter, and peace-maker. With that in mind, some of secessionist demands were practically scripted, and sometimes could be even coordinated with republic's KGB heads. (But, of course, with diminishing authority, and resources in Kremlin it went out if control soon, and contributed to many very real conflicts afterwards)

Quite a few of these disputes were about nationalities, which is interesting as I encountered this recently. I noticed on one page that someone famous was quite unusually described as "British" when "Welsh" was more accurate. A bit more digging and it turned out to be the work of a user who had made a few contributions changing "Scottish" and "Welsh" to "British" with comments like "corrected the nationality, Welsh isn't a real nationality".

The person had also made edits to some Russian rugby team, so I suspect it was motivated by both Scotland (narrowly) and Wales (heavily) beating England in a rugby competition that year :)

Having been born and lived in the UK for my entire life has given me an intensely low tolerance of arguments about nationality. These things may be very important in practical terms - e.g. whether the UK remains part of the EU, or Scotland remains part of the UK - but the quality of discussion around them is about as interesting as reading the entire talk page of a Wikipedia edit war over and over (and over) again.

Born and lived in UK for most of my life. I generally agree but it really varies. Thing is, there are interesting discussions to be had around the past, the present and the future of the various nationalities in the country ... however much of the time the people most enthusiastic about taking part in them are not the kind you have a good conversation with.

Yeah, it's a fascinating area to talk about if you're with genuinely curious people - for example I think there are some really interesting discussions going on about the changing notion of being "British" in the context of second- and third-generation immigrants - but the quality of the debate is so often terrible that I'm very wary of starting conversations as people can get worked up very quickly.

I dunno if I want a "debate" or anything, but certainly the ability to openly consider things like, for example, what an independent Scotland might look like. As it stands pro-indy people often declare it'll be a riproaring success from the start, while anti-indy Scots fear-monger about Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP being some sinister totalitarians and from south of the border you get some pretty condescending stuff about being a "third-world country". That's just one example, but I imagine it's not uncommon across various subjects.

My friends are all pretty level-headed and good to talk to, but online things tend to get very tribal and center around these exaggerated points as if there's a referee keeping track of the points you scored on your "opposition".

Nationalistic edit-wars are the worst, and these are most likely to rage all the way up through ArbCom decisions.

I visited Catalonia once fifteen years ago, and so for a while I had an interest in Barcelona and Catalonian topics such as Antoni Gaudí. Now, I knew about the Catalonian independence movement, and the history of oppression by Franco and so forth. So it was no surprise that the nationality of Gaudí was controversial. If you put that he was a Spanish architect then someone would soon come along and change it to "Catalan architect" and of course, that could not stand more than a few days before a nationalist would change it back to "Spanish". So we compromised on "Antoni Gaudí was a Spanish Catalan architect", and this phrasing withstood most scrutiny, and we managed to tamp down the edit-war on that particular lead sentence.

Other nationalistic edit-wars of note include the naming of the FYROM (Macedonia and "North" Macedonia), Armenian genocide denial, the Israel-Palestine conflict, of course, and many many others.

One that I vividly remember because I tried to mediate it was the edit war over the name of Pristina (capital of Kosovo) - whether it should use the then-traditional phonetic English spelling "Prishtina", Latin Serbian "Priština" (either with or without the diacritic), or Albanian "Prishtinë". It got bad enough that at some point the article used double naming throughout.

Recently somebody replaced the skyline and landmark photos of the Birmingham Alabama page with their shitty smartphone pictures from an overcast day and have cried victim because somebody called their pictures shitty. To me that's the lamest edit war because it happened in February and hasn't been resolved.

Is it because the labour is unpaid, people think their contributions are equally as valid, or even proportional to the effort they put in? Like when someone volunteers for a charity/nonprofit but does a shit job and you have to ask them politely to stop.

I don't think that's really a huge factor, based on my many years doing all sorts of volunteer work. These kind of small conflicts happen all the time in all sorts of contexts. The thing that makes Wikipedia so difficult is there is no one with any authority to tell people to knock it off (or rather, things need to escalate quite badly before someone comes in and does so). At your job there's our boss or whomever, and even at many volunteer jobs there's often someone who intervenes at an early enough stage. This is also why small conflicts between neighbours can escalate so bewilderingly spectacularly in ways that can be hard to understand for onlookers.

Heh, that’s great:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Birmingham,_Alabama

(Dunno how to link to the actual comment in question from mobile but it’s near the bottom there)

> "I don't have control over the weather forecast, and i don't have the money for the best photography equipment in the world."

Reading this made my head hurt. "It's not my fault the pictures are bad, therefore these bad pictures should replace good pictures." I think I need to lay down.

I checked out his talk page and he has photos from all over the US, including my town! And the pictures he has for here aren't good either!

Reminds me of a user I found who was, what I consider, vandalizing pages by replacing black and white photos with his poor quality AI colored photos

TBF there's not many nice pictures that could be taken of Birmingham. Half that city is an apocalyptic hellscape.

That isn't true. I grew up there and most of the city is residential neighborhoods surrounding a downtown that has been getting renovated and updated for the past twenty years or so. In terms of particularly photogenic places there are:

* Vulcan

* The Kirklin Clinic (designed by IM Pei, his first design I believe)

* The County Courthouse

* 16th Street Baptist Church

* Various venues along Birmingham's freedom trail

* All of the pioneer churches have pretty unique architecture.

* Railroad Park

* Five Points South

Even Sloss Furnace is a pretty photogenic ruin. Also Woodlawn, where I grew up, has seen a lot of love. I remember when it smelled like piss on 1st avenue but now it just smells like outside. And tbh I've yet to see a biker gang with an assless chaps dress code so I'm not quite sure what you saw as apocalyptic.

I only briefly visited Alabama, but the Sloss blast furnace was a highlight of my trip. There is a haunting beauty to that place.

Sloss at sunset is a thing of beauty

> Was Chopin French, French–Polish, Polish, or Polish–French?

An aside, but maybe this wouldn’t be as much of an issue if not every biographic article had to start with “<Full name> (<DOB>) is a <nationality> <profession>”. I never understood why nationality should be considered more important than the reason someone is notable.

"Representation is important."

Well, before the metaverse, a persons geographical position and date of birth allowed for some inference of context. You get a 4D coordinate, so to speak. Doesn’t seem very strange to me?

But, of course, place of birth doesn't determine nationality, and also not necessarily modern nationality. I know a few families whose children were born in France, but have the Spanish nationality, and one of them changed nationality (not to French). Polish borders have shifted a few times, to highlight another problem.

I think the problem comes from trying to keep the text short.

> place of birth doesn't determine nationality

Depends: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

In most of the Americas it actually does.

In most of the world by landmass and population it doesn’t

As anybody with dual citizenship has the passports to prove it, Jus Soli is only half (or a third, for triple citizenship) the story.

Anyone with a dual should give one to a stateless person. The group no one talks about.

That's not how nationality/citizenship works, is it?

Not saying they could but think of how many people have more than one citizenship and how many have none. Without a state you are shutoff from everything from the internet to basic rights or a legal place to live. Existing is most likely violating someone's law

That only leaves

- the rest of the world

- the fact that right to nationality is not the same as having it. France has the same right, but --as I already pointed out-- there are quite a few people born there who didn't take the nationality

- the fact that it can change, and that the inference becomes invalid in the future

It depends whether you're trying to follow the "inverted pyramid" writing style [1], which aims to strictly put the most important things first.

Some would say, when describing Tim Berners-Lee, the fact he invented the web is more important than the year of his birth, his middle name, his knighthood or his nationality.

Wikipedia does get his invention of the web into the first sentence of the article [2], which is good - but not before "Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS, RDI (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist"

Of course, it's might not be practical for Wikipedia to follow the inverted pyramid style, as it might invite edit wars about what counts as most important.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

Nationality is not a geographical position. It’s more like saying that someone is a “millenial” instead of listing their actual date of birth.

But unlike which generation you are born in, nationality is not a simple, fixed, unique thing that everyone has.

This position has been well-considered in all the edit wars listed.

But it isn't? It's just the rule that adjectives come before nouns.

But in Spanish or French it would be reversed since adjectives come after the noun, e.g. a <profession> <nationality>.

> Compact Disc is a tradename, and therefore is capitalised. But the logo says "Compact disc", and the term is now used as a generic term for compact disks or compact discs, depending on where in the world they are. Everyone calls them CDs (or maybe CD's).

My headcanon:

- The logo says "dɪsᴄ", like what can be represented on the seven-segment display that would be found on the front of any player even in the '80s.

- They cease being "Compact Discs" and start being "CDs" in ~1994 (region dependent) when they started being pressed with IFPI codes: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/can-you-tell-if-an-au...

Related to this, why is there a disc in the SD card logo? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeLvdE8lNW4

For months or longer, there's been an edit war around Solana vs Ethereum, where mods (it appears deliberate) only allow negative content about the former.

It felt petty that adults who've spent over a decade editing such a vast source of information could end up devoting a chunk of their unpaid labour time to such petty edit wars.

I didn't know that there's so many edit wars, speaks to the vastness of Wikipedia.

It is petty? If you have a vested interest in cryptocurrency, in particular a cryptocurrency that you've got a lot of, and a vested interest in a different cryptocurrency not replacing yours, that gives someone real financial motive not to allow negative comments about the former, and to make it sound like the latter is on shakey ground and is just moments from collapse. I'd flex whatever Wikipedia editor privileges I had if significant portions of my net worth was tied up in Ethereum and not Solana. Greedy sure, but not petty, not when huge amounts of money are on the line.

It would be petty.

Your example would be greedy and petty, and a couple other words.

Mind explaining how it's petty when life-changing amounts of money are on the line?

It's striking how many of these are arguments over what nationality to ascribe to someone born in X, whose parents are from Y, but now lives in Z.

I'm surprised Wikipedia doesn't have a formal scheme for referencing what is apparently a common source of contention.

It gets extra-spicy when editors start debating what nationality a person was, using names of countries which didn't even exist when the subject of the article was alive (e.g. people born in Central/Eastern Europe before WWI).

If you like your wikipedia spicy, you may enjoy the story of Croatian-language wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia

Or like when someone says they are from Punjab.

I was born in A, my wife born in B. Along life’s journey I picked up nationality C. We now live in D, where our child was born. Due to the rules of D, our child has nationality C. I can’t wait to join an edit struggle over their Wikipedia page.

I don't think a person who by their own admission picks up nationality like some curio at a flea market is a reliable guide. Voting for preëmptive ban in case their offspring passes the threshold for WP:Notability some time in the future.

I've noticed that when talking about national teams the BBC has started to refer to things like "the England team" and "the England player" to get around the potential controversy of calling someone "English". And I don't say that to disagree - I think that's probably a better formulation given the relatively recent global freedom of movement, and lack of control that young sportspeople have over where their parents bring them to live.

This is extremely useful. Lately I've begun to feel that my edit wars had descended into the just the usual mundane back & forth. My spirit wasn't really in it. But a guide like this is just what I needed to revitalize my pettiness and perhaps even raise it to new heights.

> Editors then took to the talk page and began hurling profanity at each other as they discussed whether the essay contained valuable advice about civility

Recent HN articles on Wikipedia are not helping me to like the edit system.

Seeing someone on a crusade to edit other people's work because they don't like a phrase was really distasteful to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35838180

Now these edit wars are even more so.

If I were to write something in a Wikipedia article and some bad grammar or word choice slipped in, I'd be thrilled that someone else would correct it for me. Not for me, but for everyone.

It's not like traditional published works don't go through an editing process. Part of the point of that editing process is there to fix language usage issues.

Also I think "because they don't like a phrase" is a bit of an uncharitable description of what they're doing. You may think it's silly or pedantic, but it's not for us to decide (or even pass judgment on) what other people choose to do with their spare time. I'm sure you and I both have hobbies or whatever that others might think are silly wastes of time (like commenting on HN about silly things like this).

I'm not against them spending time. I'm against their attempt at controlling the use of language. They're not fixing a mistake, they're rewriting according to personal preference. I see this as defacing other people's work.

To me it would be like going into an open source project and changing the tab spacing just because it's not the one you use.

> To me it would be like going into an open source project and changing the tab spacing just because it's not the one you use.

This analogy doesn't work because one of Wikipedia's rules is that nobody owns any article, even if they wrote it themselves:

> All Wikipedia pages and articles are edited collaboratively by a community of volunteer contributors. Individual contributors, also called editors, are known as Wikipedians. No one, no matter what, has the right to act as though they are the owner of a particular article (or any part of it).

> Once you have posted it to Wikipedia, you cannot stop anyone from editing text you have written. As each edit page clearly states:

>> Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone

> Similarly, by submitting your ideas (for article organization, categorization, style, standards, etc.) to Wikipedia, you allow others to challenge and develop them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content

Open source software projects are different because each repo is usually controlled by at least one owner who can make decisions based solely on their own preferences. On Wikipedia, every disagreement is put to discussion and there is no article owner who can overrule everyone else.

No analogy holds 100%. It feels the same to me. Yes there are many differences. As with every analogy.

My point is that if you edit an article on Wikipedia, you can't reasonably expect the article to be as you left it. Every article is ever changing and nobody gets to stake a claim to anything they write.

I don't disagree with that point.

> You may think it's silly or pedantic, but it's not for us to decide

If we thought it was silly or pedantic you'd be right. But we think it's wrong.

I have no desire to repeat the exhaustive discussion recently on this site about why.

It looks like the one about where Romford is, is not listed; however it has been ongoing from 2008 until this year.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Romford

> Various supporters of the US Libertarian party (founded in 1971) argue that they own the meaning of the word "libertarian", that placing it next to "socialism" is a contradiction in terms, and hence that libertarian socialism (described circa 1850) cannot possibly have existed. An edit war and request-for-deletion war ensues.

That doesn't sound very libertarian of them.

I've been permanently banned from "the" libertarian subreddit specifically for suggesting that libertarian socialism is a thing that exists. It's almost as if their cries about things not being "real libertarianism" is and always has been good ol' gaslighting and projection.

What does libertarian socialism mean? I guess you mean to say, the means of production can be shared across all workers and still economic activity can be directed by markets?

That it's meant to be liberating. Historical libertarian socialists were very concerned with issues like female suffrage and freedom from oppressive social norms as much as economic relations - the sort of concerns that would be derided as 'woke' today. Many of them were anarchists and libertarian socialism is generally anti-authoritarian and often anti-state.

They were also alert to the possibility of socialism becoming another oppressive orthodoxy; Emma Goldman is famous for saying 'if I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution' (although this is paraphrase of some wordier remark made in an interview). Murray Bookchin is probably the best-known modern exponent of these ideas.

There's about as many varieties of libertarian socialism as there are libertarian socialists, but your guess is pretty close. The usual endgame would be the abolition of the state in favor of cooperatives, unions, and mutual aid networks, though a complete abolition of the state ain't really necessary for a society to start to look simultaneously libertarian and socialist in practice. The big historical example was Spain prior to the fascists winning the Spanish Civil War; contemporary examples include Rojava and the EZLN (though the latter tends to reject any particular label).

The thing most/all self-identified libertarian socialists have in common is the perception that capitalism and the state are, if not one and the same, heavily reliant on one another, to the point that abolishing one without abolishing the other leaves in place the material conditions that make both inevitable. It ain't enough to replace state agencies with private corporations, because those corporations will simply become the state - nor is it enough to replace corporations with state agencies, because the bureaucrats running those agencies will simply become the new bourgeoisie or outright aristocracy.

Not necessarily shared across all workers, but, at the very least, owned by workers who actually use those means to produce something.

I’m amazed at the historical ignorance of the US Libertarians. For most of the past two centuries (since Proudhon), “libertarianism” without any qualifiers would refer to the socialist form – and as a synonym for “anarchism”. The politics of the US Libertarian Party has far more in common with classic laissez-faire liberal capitalism than pre-existing anarchism/libertarianism.

Also, unlike the socialists, the individualist and the free-market branches of libertarian thought never had mass support. A mere 4 decades before the US Libertarian party was founded, an explicitly, self-described libertarian communist organisation in just one country had well over a million members (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo).

It’s kind of tragic that American dominance of Internet culture has meant that even a decade ago, younger people that I spoke to were only aware of the more recent capitalist form of libertarianism.

I love it. What fun. I love the discourse and I love the edit wars.

Everybody here seems to be talking about how disappointing this is. But this is exactly what Wikipedia is - this is Wikipedia working as intended.

This article calls these lame but then relishes them one by one. There’s something quite precious about this.

Unresolved conflicts and civil disagreement whil eventually compromising is what democracy is all about..

“You can’t fight in here, this is the war room!”

The rule for Wikipedia is this: the more obscure the topic, the more reliable the content.

It's because the propaganda monkeys congregate around the topics they want to spin on behalf of their paymasters. It's an amusing propaganda circus as the topics become more politically relevant.

Wikipedia has lots of interesting corners, but only the ones that escape the attention of the paid PR monkey editors. All in all it's just become an utter failure in terms of its original promise.

Some how it seems fitting that this article itself had lame edit wars, and there were even lame edit wars about the section mentioning that this article had lame edit wars.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35132542 (March 2023, 3 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22992544 (April 2020, 318 comments)

The artwork provides accurate historical depictions of the edit wars.

I really miss Encyclopaedia Dramtica sometimes.

It's funny to see a real article on Wikipedia divert so greatly from the trademark neutral encyclopedic writing style.

The entire Wikipedia: namespace is a bit more relaxed, and often amusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_...

My memory is fuzzy here, but I recall at some point there was a big edit war over the Hot Dogs page. Yes, hot dogs.

Who knew that tasty Hummus was the source of so much conflict?

> Aeris vs Aerith

She'll always be Aeris to me.

> Star Trek Into Darkness

Well, that depends. If it's a sub-tag, like "Star Trek: " then it's capitalized. Ergo, "Star Trek: Into Darkness". But if it's "Star Trek" going into darkness, then it's lowercase. Anyways, I think it's "Star Trek Into Darkness" (the different font on the official title leads me to believe it is more like "Star Trek: Into Darkness" so it should be capitalized.

I don't mind being downvoted (or however it's called on HN) but, at least leave a comment as to why.

I didn't vote either way on your comment, but I suspect it's because it's a bit silly to essentially move the edit wars into comment threads here. I'm guessing that wasn't your intent, but I see how it could come off that way.

(Also, please don't complain/ask about downvotes. HN guidelines prohibit it, and for good reason: complaining or asking about downvotes can only at best result in non-interesting meta discussion, and at worst can cause tension and mini flame wars.)

(I agree with you on Aeris, though.)

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