[Air-l] wikipedia video unlikely in real wikilife

[phoebe ayers]

On 4/24/07, Barry Wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca> wrote:
>
> Some one was asking about a video showing an edit war on Wikipedia.
>
> I think it is not likely in real Wikipedia life because of the
> Three-Revert Rule:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Three-revert_rule
>
> Which basically says don't revert an article three times in a 24 hour
> period. This is an official Wikipolicy. And the norm is that you can't use
> meatpuppets or sockpuppets to evade.
>
> OTOH, as best as I can glean, it is not automatic in that the software
> doesn't ban you if you go over 3. But I've seen multiple cases of a person
> complaining (often the other you're editing) to an admin who then blocks
> the 3-reverter for 24 hours or more.
>
> I know I've been tempted to do multiple reverts in one article (the other
> person is always wrong, eh?), but decided I didn't want to be in edit war
> hell.
>
> And no, I am not doing systematic research on Wikipee. Just a Wikiuser.
> Barry Wellman


Note that the 3-Revert rule (or 3RR) was first developed in 2004, and was
instituted partly because of "edit wars" which had once occurred. Today, the
rule against edit warring is fairly well ingrained in Wikipedia culture and
you hardly ever see it anymore. Note that this doesn't apply to vandalism
removal, where dozens of reverts may happen in a single day. And no, it's
not an automatic process; rather, a social one.

The closest thing I know of to a video about editing or edit-warring are
Fernanda Viegas' et al "History Flow" simulations, where edit wars can be
clearly seen in the early data. There's also a great video clip of the
editing of the "Heavy Metal Umlaut" video -- not an edit war per se, but
does show the back-and-forth:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

-- phoebe



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