Talk:Disputes on Wikipedia

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A fact from Disputes on Wikipedia appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 11 November 2024 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that editors often line up in rival camps during contentious disputes on Wikipedia and the winning side typically cites encyclopedic policies to favor their viewpoint?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2024/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Disputes on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia

Edit wars content from List of edit wars on Wikipedia

Placeholder for discussion of content merged from List ProfGray (talk) 13:34, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Merge from Wikipedia articles

Placeholder for other merge edits ProfGray (talk) 22:24, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Kimikel talk 03:25, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(

Comment or view
Article history

)

... that the initial stance taken in disputes on Wikipedia, over deleting an article, can predict the result, due to the "herd effect"?

Source: 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. See 13-14 "early voters"

ALT1: ... that the longest "edit war" sequence among disputes on Wikipedia involved 20 editors making 108 reverts of the article on Turkey's first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk? Source: Chhabra, Anamika, Rishemjit Kaur, and S. R. S. Iyengar. "Dynamics of edit war sequences in Wikipedia." In Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, pp. 1-10. 2020. see section 4.2 "Longest Edit War Sequence"
ALT2: ... that editors often line up in rival camps during contentious disputes on Wikipedia and the winning side typically cites encyclopedic policies to favor their biased viewpoint? Source: Morris-O'Connor, Danielle A., Andreas Strotmann, and Dangzhi Zhao. "The colonization of Wikipedia: evidence from characteristic editing behaviors of warring camps." Journal of Documentation 79, no. 3 (2023): 784-810. There are other sources on rival camps.
ALT3: ... that editors tend to exacerbate disputes on Wikipedia when they greet each during discussions, use 2nd-person pronouns, or take turns speaking? Source: de Kock, Christine; Vlachos, Andreas (April 19–23, 2021). "I Beg to Differ: A study of constructive disagreement in online conversations".
Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Genesis (Lebrun)
Comment: Timing -- I created this early in term for my presentation at Wiki Conf NA, even though I couldn't edit for three days due to religious reasons. So please forgive the late submission. I see various potential hooks, let me know what seems most appealing. Will do a QPQ, I now see that's required.

Created by ProfGray (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 5 past nominations.

ProfGray (talk) 18:31, 11 October 2024 (UTC).[reply]

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

QPQ: Done.

Overall:

Pass with religious exemption (as explained up above) for newness criterion which exceeded the limit by several days. The nominator has addressed all copyedit concerns that I left on their talk page[1] with new revisions directly resolving the problems.[2] I have no real preference for any one of the hooks, so I will state my preference based solely on hook length, from short to long: first choice ALT0; seocnd choice ALT3; third choice ALT1, fourth choice ALT2. Good work.I left numerous comments on your user talk page about this article so I won't reinvent the wheel here. Besides the newness (religious exemption request), sourcing (cite needed tags), and minor issues (grammar), I think this could conceivably be salvaged for DYK if others don't have a problem with that. Of the four hooks above, none of them is as interesting as the golden nugget I pointed to on your talk page, and it's too bad you didn't use that as a hook, because it's fascinating. As for what we have here, I can't say I have a favorite or a preferred one, so if you can get the article in shape (and nobody objects to the newness exemption), we can move forward. I'm fine with letting someone else choose the hook because my preferred one isn't here. Viriditas (talk) 23:05, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Types of disputes

Currently this article does not distinguish disputes over fact-checking, editorial policy over content, editor administration, and institutional policy over things like governance and strategic vision. I am a Wikimedian and community insider, and to me these are quite different, but I recognize that sources and journalists in reliable sources often develop outsider views that all of these are the same.

I posted some major institutional strategy disputes at User_revolt#Wikipedia. I am not sure how to develop this "Disputes on Wikipedia" article further because the ideal source would be some definition, categorization, and delineation of disputes, and no such thing exists.

All of this is interesting to me. @ProfGray: I would like to talk more. Bluerasberry (talk) 20:24, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There certainly have been different types of disputes, including WP policies, governance, and strategy. Currently the lead mentions "internal Wikipedia affairs" as a type, but so far there isn't much to back that up in the article. Before a typology is put into the article in Wiki voice, it'd be helpful if there were external reliable sources that classified these types. Right? Maybe we already agree on this.

The history section does mention the early dispute over advertising and the Spanish fork, and a couple other issues. The disputes at User_revolt#Wikipedia are all relevant, they could at least be paraphrased in the history section. How common is the phrase "user revolt" in the Wikipedia-related articles there?

The research literature on WP is vast -- I've tried to cover much of the recent scholarship on content disputes. For instance, studies on RfA discussions/disputes could be added here. Some of the article dispute research does touch on internal WP issues.

As you might imagine, I'm wary of merely listing disputes in this article, even those with external reliable sources. But it'd be great to include scholarship or other thoughtful secondary sources about other types of disputes beyond article content. Regardless, would be happy to talk more! ProfGray (talk) 22:28, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@ProfGray: Yes, it would be helpful if there were external reliable sources which classified types. No, I do not think one exists.

No, "user revolt" is not a common term in either Wikipedia literature or literature about user generated content platforms in general. It is a term in use. Also, I set up that article years ago, and the discourse has advanced a lot. Wikipedia really is not part of the discourse, but I think it would be if more information about Wikipedia were available.

I also do not think this article is the place to list disputes with minimal documentation.

Conceivably, I could help collect a bibliography of any mentions of disputes, and possibly, I could contribute to a review of such a collection. I wish such a review already existed, and I would like to cite a review like that and have it reflected in this Wikipedia article. You have already gone a long way in drafting this article and that's really impressive. I could manage some more progress but I anticipate that this article's development is going to hit a wall simply because no researcher has ever considered the disputes collectively to classify and explain them. I have the idea that we are at the point where this original research should happen off-wiki. Bluerasberry (talk) 22:46, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Somehow it'd be great to plug into this conversation, or to inspire to work on the article: @Rhododendrites and @Piotrus, who could both contribute significantly. ProfGray (talk) 22:07, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There may be something in Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia. @Pundit

My own work at [3] might be of some relevance, if someone cares to cite it (I prefer not to, due to possible COI issues).

I am also reminded of User:Volunteer Marek/gt (@Volunteer Marek) but AFAIK it was never developed into a published paper. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:01, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is this just English wikipedia?

We talk about structures (Arbcom etc), but are these the same in all languages? Secretlondon (talk) 15:35, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Secretlondon: No. There is little documentation of how things work in other languages, and no paper giving an overview to compare and contrast it all generally. The only source of this information is to go ask humans who know. Bluerasberry (talk) 16:19, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think we should probably say that this is English wiki only, but do the sources say that? Secretlondon (talk) 16:22, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No, there are sources that cover other Wikipedias. For instance, Spanish and French. See contentious topics section and history section. Yasseri deals with 10 languages, I believe. Anyway, your concern is well taken and it'd be good to include more info from other Wikipedias. For instance, the article could include the huge Croatia case. ProfGray (talk) 00:05, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]