Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars

[p4radox]

Just been linked to this page via Digg:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LEW

Occasionally, Wikipedians lose their minds and get into edit wars over the most petty things. Though not comprehensive or authoritative, this page documents this "color of the bikeshed" phenomenon by showing some of the worst-case scenarios where obsessed Wikipedians have attached so much importance to some small detail that they fervently revert, dispute, and argue any change that happens to ruffle their editorial feathers, sometimes so much that no one else can get any real work done on the article in question (page protection and/or user blocks notwithstanding).


Some highlights:

Exploding whale
Is the totally alliterative phrase "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds" worthy of inclusion? Was placed on WP:RFC at one point.

Semen
A user who "contributed" several photographs of his own penis to articles takes an actual photo of his own semen and puts it on the page. Cue an ongoing several-months-long revert war over the image on whether a badly taken picture of some exhibitionist nerd's ***** should be included as a "necessary" visual aid.

Wii
Is this article about "Wii" or "Nintendo Wii"? If it's "Wii," should it be called just "Wii" or "the Wii"? Or maybe "Nintendo's Wii"? Does it rhyme with "We" or "Wee"? Should "Wee" link to urine? Is "Wee" slang or a euphemism for urine? Is it a British or International word for urine? Is it even worth mentioning in the article at all? Just some of the hard-hitting issues that provoked in excess of 1500 edits in the space of two weeks -- long before the console was even released, and shortly before a massive war breaks out over "non-official external links" that leads to a huge strawpoll to end the issue, and continuing debates over whether the official or unofficial names of the console and its accessories (for example, the "Wii Remote" aka "Wii-mote" aka "Wiimote") are more commonly used and which ones should be mentioned in which articles.

List of numbers that are always odd
The number 3 was being considered as possibly being not odd. Page protection was needed to halt the heated debate. User:Wik's correction of a misspelling of hypochondriacs was re-reverted no less than 3 times. Supposedly as a means to illustrate the ludicrousness of the subject, various examples such as "the atomic numbers of gold and silver, but not their sum" and "the number of days in a year (except leap years)" were added to the list. Later in the edit war, no less than two thousand five hundred numbers of debated oddness (every second integer from 1 to 4999) were added and removed, four hundred ninety eight of them repeatedly before the edit war was solved by the article's deletion after a VfD vote.

 

[Kreeeee]

Christ, and I thought some people on OcUK were pathetic!