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Lamest Edit Wars

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11–20 of 90 posts

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#11
post #10
post #6

> Was Chopin French, French–Polish, Polish, or Polish–French? An aside, but maybe this wouldn’t be as much of an issue if not every biographic article had to start with “ ( ) is a ”. I never understood why nationality should be considered more important than the reason someone is notable.

Well, before the metaverse, a persons geographical position and date of birth allowed for some inference of context. You get a 4D coordinate, so to speak. Doesn’t seem very strange to me?

But, of course, place of birth doesn't determine nationality, and also not necessarily modern nationality. I know a few families whose children were born in France, but have the Spanish nationality, and one of them changed nationality (not to French). Polish borders have shifted a few times, to highlight another problem.

I think the problem comes from trying to keep the text short.

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#12

Recently somebody replaced the skyline and landmark photos of the Birmingham Alabama page with their shitty smartphone pictures from an overcast day and have cried victim because somebody called their pictures shitty. To me that's the lamest edit war because it happened in February and hasn't been resolved.

Heh, that’s great:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Birmingham,_Alabama

(Dunno how to link to the actual comment in question from mobile but it’s near the bottom there)

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#13

Recently somebody replaced the skyline and landmark photos of the Birmingham Alabama page with their shitty smartphone pictures from an overcast day and have cried victim because somebody called their pictures shitty. To me that's the lamest edit war because it happened in February and hasn't been resolved.

Heh, that’s great: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Birmingham,_Alabama (Dunno how to link to the actual comment in question from mobile but it’s near the bottom there)

> "I don't have control over the weather forecast, and i don't have the money for the best photography equipment in the world."

Reading this made my head hurt. "It's not my fault the pictures are bad, therefore these bad pictures should replace good pictures." I think I need to lay down.

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#15
Quite a few of these disputes were about nationalities, which is interesting as I encountered this recently. I noticed on one page that someone famous was quite unusually described as "British" when "Welsh" was more accurate. A bit more digging and it turned out to be the work of a user who had made a few contributions changing "Scottish" and "Welsh" to "British" with comments like "corrected the nationality, Welsh isn't a real nationality".

The person had also made edits to some Russian rugby team, so I suspect it was motivated by both Scotland (narrowly) and Wales (heavily) beating England in a rugby competition that year :)

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#16

It's striking how many of these are arguments over what nationality to ascribe to someone born in X, whose parents are from Y, but now lives in Z. I'm surprised Wikipedia doesn't have a formal scheme for referencing what is apparently a common source of contention.

It gets extra-spicy when editors start debating what nationality a person was, using names of countries which didn't even exist when the subject of the article was alive (e.g. people born in Central/Eastern Europe before WWI).

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#17
> Editors then took to the talk page and began hurling profanity at each other as they discussed whether the essay contained valuable advice about civility

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#18
> Various supporters of the US Libertarian party (founded in 1971) argue that they own the meaning of the word "libertarian", that placing it next to "socialism" is a contradiction in terms, and hence that libertarian socialism (described circa 1850) cannot possibly have existed. An edit war and request-for-deletion war ensues.

That doesn't sound very libertarian of them.

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#19

It's striking how many of these are arguments over what nationality to ascribe to someone born in X, whose parents are from Y, but now lives in Z. I'm surprised Wikipedia doesn't have a formal scheme for referencing what is apparently a common source of contention.

I was born in A, my wife born in B. Along life’s journey I picked up nationality C. We now live in D, where our child was born. Due to the rules of D, our child has nationality C. I can’t wait to join an edit struggle over their Wikipedia page.

Re: Lamest Edit Wars

#20

Recently somebody replaced the skyline and landmark photos of the Birmingham Alabama page with their shitty smartphone pictures from an overcast day and have cried victim because somebody called their pictures shitty. To me that's the lamest edit war because it happened in February and hasn't been resolved.

Is it because the labour is unpaid, people think their contributions are equally as valid, or even proportional to the effort they put in? Like when someone volunteers for a charity/nonprofit but does a shit job and you have to ask them politely to stop.

I don't think that's really a huge factor, based on my many years doing all sorts of volunteer work. These kind of small conflicts happen all the time in all sorts of contexts. The thing that makes Wikipedia so difficult is there is no one with any authority to tell people to knock it off (or rather, things need to escalate quite badly before someone comes in and does so). At your job there's our boss or whomever, and even at many volunteer jobs there's often someone who intervenes at an early enough stage. This is also why small conflicts between neighbours can escalate so bewilderingly spectacularly in ways that can be hard to understand for onlookers.
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