On 4/24/07, Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> wrote:
Some one was asking about a video showing an edit war on Wikipedia.
I think it is not likely in real Wikipedia life because of the Three-Revert Rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Three-revert_rule
Which basically says don't revert an article three times in a 24 hour period. This is an official Wikipolicy. And the norm is that you can't use meatpuppets or sockpuppets to evade.
OTOH, as best as I can glean, it is not automatic in that the software doesn't ban you if you go over 3. But I've seen multiple cases of a person complaining (often the other you're editing) to an admin who then blocks the 3-reverter for 24 hours or more.
I know I've been tempted to do multiple reverts in one article (the other person is always wrong, eh?), but decided I didn't want to be in edit war hell.
And no, I am not doing systematic research on Wikipee. Just a Wikiuser. Barry Wellman
Note that the 3-Revert rule (or 3RR) was first developed in 2004, and was instituted partly because of "edit wars" which had once occurred. Today, the rule against edit warring is fairly well ingrained in Wikipedia culture and you hardly ever see it anymore. Note that this doesn't apply to vandalism removal, where dozens of reverts may happen in a single day. And no, it's not an automatic process; rather, a social one. The closest thing I know of to a video about editing or edit-warring are Fernanda Viegas' et al "History Flow" simulations, where edit wars can be clearly seen in the early data. There's also a great video clip of the editing of the "Heavy Metal Umlaut" video -- not an edit war per se, but does show the back-and-forth: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html -- phoebe ________________