On Wikipedia, disputes arise from Wikipedians, who are volunteer editors, disagreeing over article content, internal Wikipedia affairs, or alleged misconduct. Disputes often manifest as repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit wars", where instead of making small changes, edits are "reverted" wholesale. Disputes may escalate into dispute resolution efforts and enforcement.
Disputes are encouraged to be discussed on talk pages, but can go straight to editing bans, and some editors just "walk away" from conflict, especially if they do not know how to defend their edits within Wikipedia's complex systems.
An early but persistent source of conflict is "proprietary editing", where an editor, who may have started an article, will not allow other editors to make changes to their content or language. Many current conflicts play out in articles about contentious topics, often with two entrenched opposing sides, that reflect debates and conflicts in society, based on ethnic, political, religious, and scientific differences.
Dispute resolution efforts have shifted over the years. For content disputes in English Wikipedia, as of 2024, editors most often resort to Requests for Comment, along with specialized discussion structures, such as Articles for Deletion. For alleged user misconduct, some Wikipedias rely on Arbitration Committees as the final word.
Disputes, editor behavior, and collaboration on Wikipedia have long been the subject of academic research, especially in the English Wikipedia. A 2023 review identified 217 articles about contributor goals, interactions, and collaboration processes, which 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 examined numerous studies of editor coordination, especially on Talk pages, as well as algorithmic governance using bots to enforce Wikipedia policies. The review found that research attention peaked in 2012, and overall Wikipedia editing peaked in 2007.
Identification of disputes 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.
Conflicts over content within articles often arise among editors, which may result in edit wars. An edit war is a persistent exchange of edits representing conflicting views on a contested article, or as defined by the website's policy: "when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other's edits." Edit wars are prohibited on Wikipedia and editors are encouraged to seek consensus through discussion, however administrative intervention may be applied if discussion is unfruitful in resolving the conflict. Generally, edit wars are provoked by the presence of highly controversial content, 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. 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.
Researchers also designed an analytical platform, titled Contropedia, to observe and measure protracted editing controversies, such as global warming.
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. The rule reportedly cut reverts in half. To identify editing disputes, scholars also tried using the number of article revisions, deletion rates between editors, or a tag placed on controversial articles. For example, up to mid-2020, there were in-depth Talk page arguments over 7,425 instances of a dispute tag. In 2012, Yasseri et al. identified disputes through a pattern recognition algorithm and tested it against human evaluations of article. By avoiding language-based criteria, they stated that their method "makes possible both inter-cultural comparisons and cross-language checks and validation". Accordingly, in a 2014 chapter, Yasseri led a different team to identify the most controversial articles in 10 Wikipedias, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Hungarian.Yasseri, Taha, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész. "The most controversial topics in Wikipedia." Fichman, Pnina; Hara, Noriko, eds. Global Wikipedia: International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration 25. Scarecrow Press (2014): 25–48.
Later research has used other methods, even absent reverts and deletion patterns. A 2021 study claimed 80% accuracy in identifying "conflict-prone discussions" by their structural features, such as back and forth commenting by two editors (ABA pattern), before any contributions by a third person. Other features include phrases and pronoun usage that mark the level of politeness or collaboration. De Kock and Vlachos classified disputes with a natural language processing (NLP) model that improved on feature-based models.
Many disputes center on the deletion of written content, which can be seen as a kind of gatekeeping. 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.
Impact of disputes Disputes are widely seen as a drain on the Wikipedia community, without adding to useful knowledge, and as creating a competitive and conflict-based culture associated with conventional masculine gender roles. Research has focused on the impoliteness of disputes, which can harm personal identities, "violate boundaries", and diminish voluntarism. Entrenched editor conflicts are said to detract from the quality and purported neutrality of Wikipedia articles.
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. Nonetheless, adversarial editing has been defended by Wikipedia leadership as important for collaboration and scholars have argued that well-managed friction among editors can benefit the encyclopedia. Controversial topics may also attract editors, as found by a 2017 lab experiment with people exposed to German Wikipedia.
Features of disputes 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 percent of responses to rude conduct were defensive, such as explaining oneself or asking for information about the critic's concern. However, 53.5 percent of the time, people responded offensively. According to a similar study, personal attacks were reciprocated 26% immediately.
Editors use a range of rebuttal tactics, ranging from insults to derailing to counterargument and refutation. Higher quality rebuttals "correlate to more constructive outcomes". Coordination tactics include asking questions, providing information, supplying context, offering a compromise, conceding or admitting lack of knowledge. Deferential wording reduces conflict, such as the phrase "by the way" or hedging to signal an openness to compromise.
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, such as policy wonk.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. Indeed, when editors bring up Wikipedia policies during a general content dispute, "wiki-lawyering", they tend to escalate the editorial conflict. Still, researchers found that citing Wikipedia policy, such as Notability, does help settle disputes over the deletion of articles.
Editing disputes may go through stages or a life cycle, as David Moats showed for the use of sources in the early days of writing about the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Deletion disputes 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 (AfD) discussions since 2004, though the rate of AfD submissions has declined after Wikipedia article creation was restricted in 2017.
As of 2018, roughly 64 percent of debates ended in deletion and 24 percent in keeping the article, a ratio that is much lower than the early years of Wikipedia. Nearly all discussions are "closed" by a Wikipedian administrator. In 2019, researchers Mayfield and Black created an NLP model to forecast AfD outcomes.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. Consistent with previous research, they found that the first "vote" (i.e., comment) can generate a "herd effect" and predict outcomes 20 percent or more over the baseline.
Deletion disputes vary among the language Wikipedias. In English Wikipedia, about 20 percent of AfD comments justify their stance with a policy, compared to less than 3 percent in German and Turkish Wikipedia. Long-time Wikipedians play an outsized role in deletion disputes. Although over 160,000 users had spoken up in AfD discussions, over half the debate comments were made by only 1,218 users. This dominance of veteran editors has increased over time.
Contentious topics
In English and several other Wikipedias, an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) 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. Disputes within contentious topics are a distinct area of research, some based on ArbCom cases and others on quantifiable variables.
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. A 2014 study identified Israel, Adolf Hitler, The Holocaust, and God as the most hotly debated articles across 10 languages.