Disputes on Wikipedia 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,[citation needed] 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, won't allow other editors to make changes to their content or language.[citation needed] 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."[1] 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.[1]
- ^ a b Ren, Yuqing; Zhang, Haifeng; Kraut, Robert E. (November 2023). "How Did They Build the Free Encyclopedia? A Literature Review of Collaboration and Coordination among Wikipedia Editors". ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 31 (1): 1–48. doi:10.1145/3617369. ISSN 1073-0516.