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This article is about an editing activity in Wikipedia. For help with an ongoing dispute, see Wikipedia:Dispute resolution.

Disputes on Wikipedia arise from disagreements over article content or internal Wikipedia affairs, which can be discussed on Talk pages, as well as from user misconduct. Disputes may result in repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit wars" and may escalate into dispute resolution efforts and enforcement. Wikipedia editors may dispute numerous articles within a contentious topic that reflect debates and conflicts in society, based on ethnic, political, religious, and scientific differences.

Disputes, editor behavior, and collaboration on Wikipedia have long been the subject of academic research. A 2023 review identified 279 articles about contributor goals, interactions, and collaboration processes, which included but was not limited to the handling of disputes. It found that Wikipedia editing peaked in 2007 and research attention peaked in 2012. The review 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 found 29 studies of editor coordination, especially on Talk pages, as well as research on algorithmic governance that uses bots to enforce Wikipedia policies.[1]

Identification of disputes

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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.

Edit wars graphic a Czech artist

Conflicts over content within articles often arise among editors, which may result in edit wars.[2]: 62  An edit war is a persistent exchange of edits representing conflicting views on a contested article,[2]: 62 [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]: 146  and editors are encouraged to seek consensus through discussion, however administrative intervention may be applied if discussion is unfruitful in resolving the conflict.[7] Generally, edit wars are provoked by the presence of highly controversial content,[3] such as abortion or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but can also occur due to other disputed matters, such as the nationality of artist Francis Bacon.[4] According to a 2020 study, the longest edit war sequence, with 105 reverts by 20 users, was a 2008 tug-of-war over the biography of Turkey's first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.[8]

Edit wars may be defined and detected in terms of reverts and mutual re-reverts. In 2004, the community instituted the three revert rule, which was examined in subsequent scholarship.[8] The rule reportedly cut reverts in half.[1] Later research has used natural language processing (NLP) to classify disputes, even absent reverts.[9]

Many disputes center on the deletion of written content, which can be seen as a kind of gatekeeping.[10] In a comparative study of such network gatekeeping on French and Spanish decolonization cases, it was found that more active editors experience fewer deletions and appear to function within rival camps.[10]

Impact of disputes

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Disputes are widely seen as a drain on the Wikipedia community, without adding to useful knowledge,[11] and as creating a competitive[12] and conflict-based culture associated with conventional masculine gender roles.[13][14] Research has focused on the impoliteness of disputes, which can harm personal identities, "violate boundaries,"[15] and diminish voluntarism.[16] Entrenched editor conflicts are said to detract from the quality and purported neutrality of Wikipedia articles.[17][18]

Occasionally, a behind-the-scenes dispute will garner negative media attention as a Wikipedia controversy. For example, after the 2019 ban of a user by the Wikimedia Foundation, media stories covered the internal debate and the resignation of 21 administrators from English Wikipedia.[19][20] Nonetheless, adversarial editing has been defended by Wikipedia leadership as important for collaboration[21] and scholars have argued that well-managed friction among editors can benefit the encyclopedia.[1]

Features of disputes

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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% of responses to rude conduct were defensive, such as explaining oneself or asking for information about the critic's concern. However, 53.5% of the time, people responded offensively.[22] According to a similar study, personal attacks were reciprocated 26% immediately.[23]

During editing disputes, Wikipedians have been found to adopt five conversational roles: architect (of the discussion structure), content expert, moderator, policy wonk, and wordsmith. The edit-focused roles, of expert and wordsmith, tended to be more successful than the conceptual, organizational roles.[24] Editors use a range of rebuttal tactics, ranging from insults to derailing to counterargument and refutation. Higher quality rebuttals "correlate to more constructive outcomes."[23] Coordination tactics include asking questions, providing information, supplying context, offering a compromise, conceding or admitting lack of knowledge.[23]

Deletion disputes

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See also: Deletion of articles on Wikipedia
Graph showing reduction in AfDs following restrictions on article creation in 2017.

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 discussions since 2004, though the rate AfD submissions decline after Wikipedia article creation was restricted to registered users. Roughly 64% ending in deletion and 24% in keeping the article. Nearly all discussions are "closed" by a Wikipedian administrator. In 2019, researchers Mayfield and Black created an NLP model to forecast AfD outcomes.[25]

Contentious topics

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See also: Arbitration Committee (Wikipedia)

The Arbitration Committee 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.

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 2013 study identified the most contested articles on Wikipedia, claiming that Israel, Adolf Hitler, and God were the most hotly debated.[26]

Editors have been found to line up in rival camps over contentious articles and topics. It is unclear how much such editors coordinate outside of the Wikipedia platform, contrary to Wikipedia policy. Apparent editor coordination can be detected through data analysis, such as the 2020 study of 1206 contentious articles that found, that editors of “contentious Wikipedia articles seem to clearly partition others into friends (those who have the same opinion on a given topic) and enemies.”[27]

Dispute resolution

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Mediation Committee logo

Soon after its founding, Wikipedia provided avenues to resolve conduct and conduct disputes disputes. In 2003, Jimmy Wales created the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom), an overarching authority for binding resolution of conduct disputes.`

ArbCom cases are structured in a formal, though it tends to be flexible and informal as it works toward decisions. More than 500 complaints were submitted to ArbCom between 2004 through 2020. ArbCom examines evidence of misconduct but its decisions have been criticized for favoring the more socially effective parties.[28]

For content disagreements, Wikipedia has experimented with a variety of mechanisms. Formal mediation was provided by a Mediation Committee, which was discontinued due to inactivity in 2018. Dispute resolution was also provided by informal groups such as the "Mediation Cabal." A 2010 study, cited by Ren et al., found that "mediators can alter the text discussion between conflicting editors (e.g., by striking through some statements), clarify ambiguity, differentiate between personal and substantive arguments, and show the editors how their exchanges could be made more constructive. They can also help manage temporal discontinuities (i.e., when one party is unavailable, the other party may make misattributions), and reduce power differences among editors."[1]

Editors may pursue informal dispute resolution through a third party or the Requests for Comment (RfC) system. During a seven year period, (English) Wikipedia had over 7,300 requests for comment discussions. While RfC discussions are often closed with a Wikipedia-style "consensus" on the content dispute, a significant number "go stale" because they are ignored by veteran editors or, conversely, they are overwhelmed with comments and too complex or controversial to be closed.[29]

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]

History of disputes on Wikipedia

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See also: History of 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.[30] Editing disputes happened frequently enough to give rise to the rule against three repeated reverts by the same editor. In 2005-2006, Wikipedians debated whether to display controversial images from the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. On internal matters, early disputes included controversial userboxes, which was resolved partly by the 2006 migration of templates to personal user pages, and a 2010 conflict over biographies of living persons.

Meanwhile, in its first decade, Wikipedia set up dispute resolution mechanisms, including the Arbitration Committee, and refined policies to designed to govern and reduce disputes. In its second decade, the Wikimedia Foundation funded and tracked research on disputes, Wikipedia set up restrictions that impinged on tendentious editing, and dispute resolution efforts were disbanded or streamlined.[citation needed] A Universal Code of Conduct for all Wikipedia organizations is designed to restrain the most egregious actions, some of which may arise from editing disputes.[31]

See also

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Further reading

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Lih, Andrew (March 17, 2009). The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia. Hyperion. ISBN 978-1-4013-0371-6.

Tkacz, Nathaniel. Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness. University of Chicago Press, 2020. ISBN 9780226192444

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f Ren, Yuqing; Zhang, Haifeng; Kraut, Robert E. (2024-02-29). "How Did They Build the Free Encyclopedia? A Literature Review of Collaboration and Coordination among Wikipedia Editors". ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 31 (1): 1–48. doi:10.1145/3617369. ISSN 1073-0516.
  2. ^ a b Jemielniak, Dariusz (2014-05-14). Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-9120-5.
  3. ^ a b Ayers, Phoebe; Matthews, Charles; Yates, Ben (2008). How Wikipedia Works: And how You Can be a Part of it. No Starch Press. p. 384. ISBN 978-1-59327-176-3.
  4. ^ a b O'Sullivan, Dan (2016-02-11). Wikipedia: A New Community of Practice?. Routledge. p. 124. ISBN 978-1-134-76624-6.
  5. ^ Rutten, Ellen; Fedor, Julie; Zvereva, Vera, eds. (2013-04-12). Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (0 ed.). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203083635-11. ISBN 978-0-203-08363-5.
  6. ^ Thomas, Paul A. (2022-09-15). Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-5381-6322-1.
  7. ^ Levene, Mark (2011-01-14). An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-06034-6.
  8. ^ a b Chhabra, Anamika; Kaur, Rishemjit; Iyengar, S. R.S. (2020-08-25). "Dynamics of Edit War Sequences in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. ACM: 1–10. doi:10.1145/3412569.3412585. ISBN 978-1-4503-8779-8.
  9. ^ Ziembowicz, Karolina; Roszczyńska-Kurasińska, Magdalena; Rychwalska, Agnieszka; Nowak, Andrzej (2022-10-03). "Predicting conflict-prone disputes using the structure of turn-taking: the case of Wikipedia". Information, Communication & Society. 25 (13): 1987–2005. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2021.1924224. ISSN 1369-118X.
  10. ^ a b Bürger, Moritz; Schlögl, Stephan; Schmid-Petri, Hannah (January 2023). "Conflict dynamics in collaborative knowledge production. A study of network gatekeeping on Wikipedia". Social Networks. 72: 13–21. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2022.08.002.
  11. ^ Kalyanasundaram, Arun; Wei, Wei; Carley, Kathleen M.; Herbsleb, James D. (December 2015). "An agent-based model of edit wars in Wikipedia: How and when is consensus reached". 2015 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC). Huntington Beach, CA: IEEE. pp. 276–287. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.715.2758. doi:10.1109/WSC.2015.7408171. ISBN 978-1-4673-9743-8. S2CID 9353425.
  12. ^ Suh, Bongwon; Convertino, Gregorio; Chi, Ed H.; Pirolli, Peter (2009). "The singularity is not near". Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. Orlando, FL: ACM Press. pp. 1–10. doi:10.1145/1641309.1641322. ISBN 978-1-60558-730-1.
  13. ^ Torres, Nicole (June 2, 2016). "Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?". Harvard Business Review. ISSN 0017-8012. Archived from the original on June 17, 2020. Retrieved August 20, 2019.
  14. ^ Bear, Julia B.; Collier, Benjamin (March 2016). "Where are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia". Sex Roles. 74 (5–6): 254–265. doi:10.1007/s11199-015-0573-y. S2CID 146452625.
  15. ^ Khazraie, Marzieh; Talebzadeh, Hossein (February 7, 2020). ""Wikipedia does NOT tolerate your babbling!": Impoliteness-induced conflict (resolution) in a polylogal collaborative online community of practice". Journal of Pragmatics. 163: 46–65. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2020.03.009.
  16. ^ Smirnov, Ivan; Oprea, Camelia; Strohmaier, Markus (December 1, 2023). Ognyanova, Katherine (ed.). "Toxic comments are associated with reduced activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia". PNAS Nexus. 2 (12): pgad385. doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad385. ISSN 2752-6542. PMC 10697426. PMID 38059265.
  17. ^ Morris-O'Connor, Danielle A.; Strotmann, Andreas; Zhao, Dangzhi (April 4, 2023). "The colonization of Wikipedia: evidence from characteristic editing behaviors of warring camps". Journal of Documentation. 79 (3): 784–810. doi:10.1108/JD-04-2022-0090. ISSN 0022-0418.
  18. ^ Ruprechter, Thorsten; Santos, Tiago; Helic, Denis (September 9, 2020). "Relating Wikipedia article quality to edit behavior and link structure". Applied Network Science. 5 (1). doi:10.1007/s41109-020-00305-y. ISSN 2364-8228.
  19. ^ Harrison, Stephen (July 2, 2019). "Wikipedia Is in the Midst of a Constitutional Crisis". Slate Magazine. Retrieved July 2, 2019.
  20. ^ Bernstein, Joseph (June 27, 2019). "Wikipedia Has Been A Safe Haven From The Online Culture Wars. That Time May Be Over". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved July 1, 2019. The once-derided open-source encyclopedia is the closest thing the internet has to an oasis of truth. Now a single-user ban has exposed the deep rifts between Wikipedia's libertarian origins and its egalitarian aspirations, and threatened that stability.
  21. ^ "Wiki wars: Do Wikipedia's internal tiffs deter newcomers?". BBC News. 2014-08-05. Retrieved 2024-10-02.
  22. ^ Khazraie, Marzieh; Talebzadeh, Hossein (July 2020). ""Wikipedia does NOT tolerate your babbling!": Impoliteness-induced conflict (resolution) in a polylogal collaborative online community of practice". Journal of Pragmatics. 163: 46–65. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2020.03.009.
  23. ^ a b c de Kock, Christine; Stafford, Tom; Vlachos, Andreas (2022). "How to disagree well: Investigating the dispute tactics used on Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. doi:10.48550/ARXIV.2212.08353.
  24. ^ Maki, Keith, Michael Yoder, Yohan Jo, and Carolyn Rosé. "Roles and success in wikipedia talk pages: Identifying latent patterns of behavior." In Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 1026-1035. 2017.
  25. ^ Mayfield, Elijah, and Alan W. Black. "Analyzing wikipedia deletion debates with a group decision-making forecast model." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, no. CSCW (2019): 1-26.
  26. ^ "Wikipedia 'edit wars' revealed". BBC. 18 July 2013. Archived from the original on 18 July 2013. Retrieved 18 July 2013.
  27. ^ Lerner, Jürgen; Lomi, Alessandro (January 2020). "The free encyclopedia that anyone can dispute: An analysis of the micro-structural dynamics of positive and negative relations in the production of contentious Wikipedia articles". Social Networks. 60: 11–25. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2018.12.003.
  28. ^ Grisel, Florian (May 2024). "Canceling Disputes: How Social Capital Affects the Arbitration of Disputes on Wikipedia". Law & Social Inquiry. 49 (2): 1060–1081. doi:10.1017/lsi.2023.15. ISSN 0897-6546.
  29. ^ Im, Jane, Amy X. Zhang, Christopher J. Schilling, and David Karger. "Deliberation and resolution on wikipedia: A case study of requests for comments." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, no. CSCW (2018): 1-24.
  30. ^ Tkacz, Nathaniel (2015). Wikipedia and the politics of openness. Chicago, Ill. London: University of Chicago press. ISBN 978-0-226-19227-7.
  31. ^ Harrison, Stephen (2021-03-02). "The Tensions Behind Wikipedia's New Code of Conduct". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 2024-10-01.

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