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