Articles of War

Wikipedia’s open-editing policy occasionally spawns all-out showdowns in which
users try to “revert” one another’s disagreeable entries into oblivion. A few
examples, as collected on the online encyclopedia’s “Lamest Edit Wars” page
(itself the subject of not a little nitpicking):

• Cat: “34 reverts in just over an hour. The pressing issues: Should
  one unremarkable photo be included? Is the cat depicted really smiling?…
  As it turned out, the photo was deleted for not having any copyright status.”
• Mama’s Family: “Was Mama (Vicki Lawrence) ‘pro-active,’ ‘foxy,’ ‘clever,’
  ‘cunning,’ or none of the above? Apparently this question is important enough
  to occupy over 30 edits in one day.”
• List of virgins: “Dispute about whether or not Britney Spears belonged
  on the list, eventually resolved in a definitive manner: maintenance of the
  list proved impossible and it was later deleted.”
• Wii: “Does it rhyme with ‘We’ or ‘Wee’? Should ‘Wee’ link to urine?…
  Should urine be mentioned in the article at all? Just some of the hard hitting
  issues that provoked in excess of 1,500 edits in the space of two weeks…
  All this for a videogame console that hasn’t even been released yet.”
• Feces: “Should the article on feces include [a] picture of a large
  human turd? As of early July 2005, the discussion on this issue alone had
  reached 12,900 words.”
• Nancy Reagan: “Was she born in 1921? Or 1923? After days of editing,
  does anyone really care THAT much? Woman is old.”