User:RM395/Course/Edit wars/Death Star

Introduction

In January of 2005, tragedy struck. A grueling and emotionally-charged edit war began behind the scenes of the Wikipedia page for the Death Star. The item in dispute? The size of the Death Star. A Death Star (officially the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station) is a fictional moon-sized spacestation and super-weapon featured in Star Wars. The debate of the size of the Death Star referred mostly to the one from the Return of the Jedi. Minus a few extraneous arguments, the dipute was mainly focused on two opposing sources. One side asserted the Death Star is 160km as found on George Lucas' starwars.com. The other side argued it's 900km as stated by a man named Curtis Saxon -- editor of the Star Wars Technical Commentaries.

The Edit War

The majority of the conflict centered around credibility of sources. Because most of the proposed sources were plausibly notable sources, the dispute did not have a clear winner. The edit war began with a confident post from the user "Samboy." This user argued the Death Star is 160km based on the source starwars.com. He argued that starwars.com was a credible source because it is owned by LucasFilm, the company that produced the Star Wars films. Shortly after he edited the Wikipedia article, Samboy was challenged by a user named "Neocapitalist." Neocapitalist claimed his source was valid because it was written by the editor of Star Wars Technical Commentaries, Curtis Saxon. Samboy objected to Neocapitalist's source because it was found on what he claimed to be a fan site. Neocapitalist elaborated on what made Curtis Saxon a credible source. He point to books that Saxon wrote as well as his work with the Star Wars movies. As well as proving his own source, Neocapitalist attempted to debunk the starwars.com argument. He asserted that George Lucas was probably not very involved in running or editing the starwars.com site. Here, Neocapitalist appears to lose his temper. He made a wild claim and said "for all we know starwars.com is pulling the 160km number out of their ass." At this point the argument had turned to stalemate amongst Samboy, Neocapitalist and a few other rogue posters. (One of who included a large, detailed segment based heavily on calculations, which for the mast part were entirely useless as he treated the Death Star as a planet, not a man-made space station.) Despite the persistent quarreling, no concrete decision came out of the discussion. The fate of the size of the Death Star did not look optimistic. However, instead of continuing the debate, something unusual happened. A poll appeared underneath the discussion. In an uplifting, faith-in-humanity-restored moment, democracy saved the day with a poll to vote on the most favorable size of the Death Star.

Outcome

Amongst the many theories about the size of the second Death Star, three became the clear front runners of the discussion:

• 120 kilometers and 160 kilometers, according to starwars.com

• 120 kilometers and 900 kilometers, according to Curtis Saxon's calculations

• 120 kilometers and 160, as per starwars.com with included mention of Saxon's numbers.

The community eventually decided that the following description would be deemed appropriate: "There is a broader range of figures for the second Death Star's diameter, ranging from 160 to 900 kilometers.[9][10]"