Disputes on Wikipedia

On Wikipedia, disputes arise from Wikipedians, who are volunteer editors, disagreeing over article content, internal Wikipedia affairs, or alleged misconduct. Disputes often manifest as repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit wars", where instead of making small changes, edits are "reverted" wholesale. Disputes may escalate into dispute resolution efforts and enforcement.

Disputes are encouraged to be discussed on talk pages, but can go straight to editing bans, and some editors just "walk away" from conflict, especially if they do not know how to defend their edits within Wikipedia's complex systems.

An early but persistent source of conflict is "proprietary editing", where an editor, who may have started an article, will not allow other editors to make changes to their content or language. Many current conflicts play out in articles about contentious topics, often with two entrenched opposing sides, that reflect debates and conflicts in society, based on ethnic, political, religious, and scientific differences.

Dispute resolution efforts have shifted over the years. For content disputes in English Wikipedia, as of 2024, editors most often resort to Requests for Comment, along with specialized discussion structures, such as Articles for Deletion. For alleged user misconduct, some Wikipedias rely on Arbitration Committees as the final word.

Disputes, editor behavior, and collaboration on Wikipedia have long been the subject of academic research, especially in the English Wikipedia. A 2023 review identified 217 articles about contributor goals, interactions, and collaboration processes, which identified 34 studies of "the causes and impact of conflict, the mechanisms for resolving conflict, and the measurement and prediction of conflict or controversial articles." The review examined numerous studies of editor coordination, especially on Talk pages, as well as algorithmic governance using bots to enforce Wikipedia policies. The review found that research attention peaked in 2012, and overall Wikipedia editing peaked in 2007.[1]

Identification of disputes

As an open collaboration writing project, from the outset Wikipedia expected disagreements among contributors. The point at which disagreements turn into disputes, and conflicts, is not uniformly defined by Wikipedia communities and the scholars who study them. Conflicts over content within articles often arise among editors, which may result in edit wars. An edit war is a persistent exchange of edits representing conflicting views on a contested article,[2][3][4] or as defined by the website's policy: "when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other's edits."[5] Edit wars are prohibited on Wikipedia[6] and editors are encouraged to seek consensus through discussion, however administrative intervention may be applied if discussion is unfruitful in resolving the conflict.

Impact of disputes

Disputes are widely seen as a drain on the Wikipedia community, without adding to useful knowledge,[15] and as creating a competitive[16] and conflict-based culture associated with conventional masculine gender roles.[17][18] Research has focused on the impoliteness of disputes, which can harm personal identities, "violate boundaries",[19] and diminish voluntarism.[20] Entrenched editor conflicts are said to detract from the quality and purported neutrality of Wikipedia articles.[21]

Features of disputes

With civility as a core principle of Wikipedia, user disputes often feature impoliteness. According to a study of disputes on 120 Talk pages, by and large "Wikipedians do not prolong the conflicts." The most common incivility is scorn, ridicule, or condescension, followed by "pointed criticism". Impolite comments got no traction, no response, two-fifths of the time. Regardless of the topic area, overt responses were divided: 37 percent of responses to rude conduct were defensive, such as explaining oneself or asking for information about the critic's concern. However, 53.5 percent of the time, people responded offensively.[19] According to a similar study, personal attacks were reciprocated 26% immediately.[27]

Editors use a range of rebuttal tactics, ranging from insults to derailing to counterargument and refutation. Higher quality rebuttals "correlate to more constructive outcomes".[27] Coordination tactics include asking questions, providing information, supplying context, offering a compromise, conceding or admitting lack of knowledge.[27] Deferential wording reduces conflict, such as the phrase "by the way" or hedging to signal an openness to compromise.[13]

Deletion disputes

Disagreements over the deletion of articles, and other types of encyclopedic content (e.g., categories and lists), are managed through discussion structures. Notably, Wikipedia (English) has had more than 400,000 Articles for Deletion (AfD) discussions since 2004, though the rate of AfD submissions has declined after Wikipedia article creation was restricted in 2017.[30]

As of 2018, roughly 64 percent of debates ended in deletion and 24 percent in keeping the article, a ratio that is much lower than the early years of Wikipedia. Nearly all discussions are "closed" by a Wikipedian administrator. In 2019, researchers Mayfield and Black created an NLP model to forecast AfD outcomes.[31] Consistent with previous research, they found that the first "vote" (i.e., comment) can generate a "herd effect" and predict outcomes 20 percent or more over the baseline.[31]

Deletion disputes vary among the language Wikipedias. In English Wikipedia, about 20 percent of AfD comments justify their stance with a policy, compared to less than 3 percent in German and Turkish Wikipedia.[32]

Contentious topics

In English and several other Wikipedias, an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) handles a variety of intractable disputes, including conflicts among users who edit multiple articles within a topic. The Committee itself defines such a situation as a "contentious topic" and its sanctions may apply expansively to all articles with the topic. Disputes within contentious topics is a distinct area of research, some based on ArbCom cases and others on quantifiable variables.[21]

Some topics appear to be unavoidably polarizing, such as abortion and climate change, although the level of editor conflict may not match the degree of public debate. In addition, a topic may be contentious in one language Wikipedia and not another.[1] A 2014 study identified Israel, Adolf Hitler, The Holocaust, and God as the most hotly debated articles across 10 languages.[33][11]

Editors have been found to line up in rival camps over contentious articles and topics.[14]

Dispute resolution

Soon after its founding, Wikipedia provided avenues to resolve content and conduct disputes. Just as editing disputes are difficult to define precisely, scholars have disagreed about identifying when disputes are resolved. Yasseri et al. categorized articles into three levels of disputation: "Consensus", "Sequence of temporary consensuses", and "Never-ending wars".[10]

For content disagreements, Wikipedia has experimented with a variety of mechanisms. Experienced editors have been found to reduce reverts by citing Wikipedia policies, especially "Neutral point of view" (NPOV), "Consensus", and "No original research". Editing disagreements may be resolved by argumentation, compromise, and explaining previous discussions.[1] As of 2024, editors may pursue dispute resolution by requesting a third party opinion, an informal arrangement intended for two editors in disagreement.

If their dispute remains unresolved, another recourse is the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard (DRN). The DRN approach does not offer formal closure or a binding compromise, but many cases are rejected for not pursuing other avenues, so it has become less useful.[36] Of 2,520 DRN cases through mid-2020, there were 237 successful resolutions, 149 failures, and 2,134 (85%) closed without a result.[13]

History of disputes on Wikipedia

One of the first large-scale disputes about Wikipedia was an internal argument over advertising, starting with Larry Sanger and dissent by Spanish editors, which led to a 2002 fork of the Spanish Wikipedia. Edit warring gave rise to the rule against three repeated reverts by the same editor.[1][10][36] In 2005–2006, Wikipedians debated whether to display controversial images from the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. On internal matters, early disputes included the 2006 userbox controversy, which was resolved partly by placing templates in personal user pages[39] and partly by administration actions by Jimmy Wales.[36]

Meanwhile, in its first decade, Wikipedia set up dispute resolution mechanisms, including the Arbitration Committee, and refined policies to govern and reduce disputes. In its second decade, the Wikimedia Foundation funded and tracked research on disputes.

See also

• Ideological bias on Wikipedia
• List of edit wars on Wikipedia
• List of Wikipedia controversies (including some disputes among Wikipedia editors)

Further reading

• Lih, Andrew (2009). The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. Hyperion. ISBN 978-1-4013-0371-6.