[Air-l] naturally occuring Wiki conflicts

[Joseph Reagle]

On Monday 26 March 2007 20:54, Barry Wellman wrote:
> For the heck of it, I've been watching 30-50 Wikipedia sites for the past
> 6 months. There are many conflicts on there, most of which get resolved.

Yes, people like to focus on conflicts [1] but relative to all of what 
happens on WP, more happens than just arguments.

[1] http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/good-faith-bad-faith

In 2004 I characterized this as:

[[

   Yet, the vast majority of Wikipedia contributors and articles are not
   the subjects of severe dispute. A number of pages within the Wikipedia
   document ongoing disputes; the following statistics are those for the
   English language Wikipedia (2004wra, 2004wrm, 2004c, 2004ss) as
   tabulated on 2004 November 16.

   In the cases of arbitration or mediation requests, such documentation
   typically identifies disputes between two contributors, occasionally
   more (e.g., naming conventions for geographical objects in Poland). By
   tabulating the number of list items on the identified page or its
   archives I estimate 52 total Requests for Arbitration (with 0 active)
   and 74 archived Requests for Mediation (with 8 active) between users.
   Note, that there are over 13,200 users who have "edited at least 10
   times since they arrived," half as many which are considered "active,"
   out of a total of 135,763 registered users.

   While not a substantive dispute, vandalism is much more common as it
   is often petty and easily done by anonymous users - or "sock puppets"
   wherein users participate with more than one identity. Consequently,
   vandalism entries are often associated with an IP number (the number
   associated with a Internet host) rather than an actual account name
   since IP numbers are more difficult to change. The Vandalism in
   Progress page (Wikipedia 2004wvp) for the past 5 days includes 25, 15,
   12, 10 and 7 entries respectively and each entry may affect more than
   one page - though it is by no means certain all vandalisms are noted
   or identified. Yet, there are over 390,000 English pages (Wikipedia
   2004wa).

   However, even a relatively few disputes can be costly to those
   unfortunate enough to encounter them:
     * Disputes take a significant amount of time and can cause
       participant exit.
     * Disputes can boil over into other topics.
     * Disputes drive the policies that then affect the rest of the
       community.
     * Disputes attract much attention from outside of the community.

   Consequently it is worthwhile to consider how disputes are mitigated
   or resolved.

]]

I'm currently revisiting this and other work [3] for a dissertation chapter.

[3] http://reagle.org/joseph/2006/05/wikipedia-results.html

> To find them, pick conflict-filled entries. Here are some I've noticed:
> Iran, Conrad Black, Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, Stephane Dion, Shootings at
> Kent State, social network (where people keep wanting to sell their
> software); Anna Nicole Smith.

In that same draft, I spoke of one of my favorite pages: Wikipedia’s Lamest 
edit wars ever [2].

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars_ever
-- 
Regards,          http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/
Joseph Reagle     E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E